A new initiative, launched in 2023 through Radford’s business school, has hosted more than 100 local high school students so far this year, giving five separate groups of young people the chance to see what campus life is like and to offer them workshops on practical and constructive topics
Based out of the Venture Lab, it's a partnership between the Davis College of Business and Economics and Junior Achievement of Southwest Virginia, which between January and April welcomed the young visitors from Botetourt, Carroll, Salem and Wythe County high schools as well as Roanoke’s Burton Center for Arts & Technology.
The students arrived early in the day, often on mornings that were chilly, and filed quietly into the lab where they got breakfast refreshments, then broke into smaller groups to spend about an hour attending three or four short classes from a topic pool that included time management, conflict resolution, career success, goal setting, starting a business and personal branding in an age of social media.
During those discussions, the teens talked about their future ambitions. One Burton student said that after high school, he would like to start his own marketing company.
Junior accounting major Jackson Hughes, a Venture Lab ambassador, was one of several Highlander volunteers – along with three MBA candidates and members of the business fraternity Delta Sigma Pi –who walked the students through basic points of business and adulthood and urged them to consider key questions.
“What are you bringing to the field? How does your service solve a customer’s problem?” Hughes asked them: “That is called a value proposition.”
Another workshop focused on resolving conflicts. The volunteers undertook role-playing exercises and discussed a set of optical illusions to underscore the ways different people can have differing perspectives. Tips included staying calm, active listening, accepting that conflict is normal, picking the right moment for a debate and understanding that once a dispute is concluded, it should be left alone.
These workshops first began in the spring of 2023 but expanded to their current size this year.
“The whole goal with Junior Achievement is to get students thinking about the future,” explained Keri Garnett, president of the group’s Southwest Virginia branch.
It’s an outreach strategy,” said Radford business management instructor Andy Travers, who’s also a longtime Junior Achievement board member. He acted as coordinator and general host during the visits.
“The goals for Junior Achievement are financial literacy, workplace readiness and financial acumen, and we've got similar goals here in the business school,” Travers said. “I thought, well, gee, we could use that common set of goals as a bridge to engage high school students.”
Steve Mason, a GED instructor with Carroll County Public Schools, chaperoned the second group that visited campus.
“Some of the workshops cover subjects that are key for our kids, and it was good to give them exposure to that,” Mason explained.
“A lot of them don’t have a chance to get out and do things like this,” he added.
The exposure is also meant to show the high schoolers just one option of what is available to them locally in terms of higher education. While on campus, they also took a tour of some of the facilities – including Hemphill Hall’s Social Media Analytics and Research Technology (SMART) Lab and the Esports Center in Cook Hall – and got a sampling of what a modern local college is like.
“It’s good for them to know what’s out there,” said Mara Pufko, an instructor at Burton and the school’s Jobs for Virginia Graduates (JVG) coordinator. “In every group we've had, there have been at least two people who said, ‘I wasn't thinking about college, but now I am.’”
The Junior Achievement workshops aren't the only recent forum Radford has offered for high school students.
In February, five regional schools visited Kyle Hall to face off in the Jobs for Virginia Graduates’ Ignite Competition, a “Shark Tank”-style contest in which students present potential business concepts.
Later the following month, nearly 300 high school students and teachers attended the JVG State Conference, which was also held at Kyle and saw the presentation of numerous scholarships.