Bloomfield Students Visit CETA

On Friday, July 18, ten eighth-grade students from the Learning Is Earning Program at Carmen Arace Middle School in Bloomfield toured CETA as part of their visit to the University. BriAnna West, Salma Bazlur, Ashley Brown, Jordan Gary, Victoria Hayes, Lashan Lee, Sashe’ Llewelyn, Corrine Patterson, Evan Varela, and Jasmin Walker were accompanied by two Arace guidance counselors, Karen Goldman and Allison Glenney.

The focus of the Learning Is Earning Program is teaching the students about the importance of education as it relates to careers and life style. The students spent three weeks learning about life skills such as budgeting, etiquette, listening and communication skills, and career exploration using career software that helps the students hone in on possible career clusters, college choices, résumé writing, etc. The program also included guest speakers who talked about their career paths and visits to various workplaces such as the Bloomfield Police Department and CIGNA as well as the University of Hartford.

In CETA, the students saw various labs and classrooms and then were introduced to Maria Qadri, a senior majoring in Biomedical Engineering, who showed the students several projects being worked on in our Environmental Lab. Maria also took the students to see one of CETA’s two wind tunnels. Because the tunnel was being set up for an experiment, she couldn’t demonstrate it, but the students were interested in the setup and asked many questions.

Here are some photos of the visit.

Maria and the students in the Environmental Lab talking about experiments being run there.

Maria with the spacesuit mockup used in experiments run for NASA.

One of the students trying on the mockup.

Maria explaining the wind tunnel to the students.