001Today is our annual sawmill day. It's a chance for students to job shadow a professional sawyer who will take a giant log and slice it into lumber, but also meet with Virginia foresters to talk about their day-to-day operations, uh, career pathways, and also the importance of utilizing this urban lumber, turning it into usable material. It's really helpful for students to figure out if this is something that they really enjoy or are really interested in. And if they are, then this is a potential career and that they could start taking classes to continue learning more about this field. >> It lets kids know that uh there's other options out there other than maybe what they traditionally are told about. You know, this is a can be a very valuable career. There's hundreds and hundreds of sawmills
002all over the country um looking for qualified people and there's different trades within those businesses. So, you know, if they like to work with their hands and stuff, then you know, they can they can learn a nice trade doing this. Well, it gives me a sort of tangible feel of what's going on in the world of carpentry as opposed to say a math or [music] a physics class where you still are applying ideas but you're [music] not applying them physically. The tree comes in and we actually uh we look at it for a couple class periods. We determine the age of the tree, the species of the tree, um any major defects that could affect the milling process, and the outcome of the lumber. We'll stack it, allow it to dry. The following year, it
003has low enough moisture content where then they can start pulling from it and actually utilizing it in their projects for carpentry 2 or carpentry 3. >> I feel like in other schools, you don't get very much of an opportunity to actually see what the jobs are like. like you're pressured to choose a career path that you want to pursue um after college or you know as a trade or whatever, but you don't really get the firsthand [music] experience to see if you really like it. So, I think it's important that students should be able to be shown like what they would be doing in the field if they were to choose that job. He's able to take the log, lift it right up with his hydraulic lifts onto the mill, and then determine based on
004the size of the log, quality of the log, how he wants to slice it to meet our needs. So this is an example of the material that we are generating from our sawmill day. This is a white oak board. It has exceptional grain qualities overall just like really high quality lumber. >> I think the reason why there's a stereotype that women uh don't really participate in this stuff is that nobody's willing to teach them. So I think that women having the opportunity to be in CTE classrooms and learn those skills is really important. So this is really cool that they can see from whence the wood comes. And just to be clear, these are all trees that had to be removed due to insect disease and infrastructure project. These are trees that were removed because
005they had to be removed. >> We always kind of like [music] wonder what the wood is from. So to know that it was from this day and just like the memories from it and the experience, that's really cool. Sometimes when you think about forestry, you have one idea of what that is, but actually there's a wide variety of connections that you can make to these careers. Um, and we just learned that they have a [music] lot of job shadowing opportunities. So whether you want one day or one week, a lot of the industry professionals are really excited to show students a day in the life. >> So when I went to college, I went to William and Mary um for biology. I was looking at a broad environmental science career. I'm kind of one of
006the more non-traditional routes of getting here and and that's another reason why I like doing these talks is to show them that there's many paths to this one point >> and you can go into all sorts of different avenues with it. Our presentation today covers everything from going into utility forestry, clearing [music] power line type things to very traditional forestry. Um, so we're kind of touching on all these different points >> and that there are career opportunities whether it's, you know, with a sawmill as a [music] forester or as an urban forester and that those career opportunities exist and we'd love [music] to have them pursue it. >> Not every student wants to be a carpenter, but they definitely want to explore careers that are closely connected to it. And so foresters [music] do a
007great job researching, maintaining our forests. that directly impacts [music] the resources that we get from those forests for carpenters. And so being able to make those connections and just have a broader lens uh enhances their opportunity [music] for higher education and future careers.