Shaping Tomorrow: How students are utilizing school resources to prepare for future careers

SM East is ranked 812th out of almost 18,000 schools in the country, offering a range of classes from the regular curriculum to more than 20 Advanced Placement courses. At SM East, students have the opportunity to get a head start on their career plans, whether it's a future nurse taking AP Biology or an engineer-in-the-making exploring Newton’s laws in physics class. Take a look at what students are doing to prepare themselves for their future.

Shawnee Mission Signature Programs at the Center of Academic Achievement give students the opportunity to explore unique areas of study in preparation for specialized academics and future career opportunities. 

The CAA allows for real-world learning and hands-on experience. The programs span from game design to biotechnology to culinary arts. Currently, almost 70 SM East are involved in the signature programs at the CAA.

Senior Sage Scott puts on her white lab coat, ready to spend hours hunched over a microscope in a dark room, illuminated by the fluorescent slides containing rat brains.

Scott is the youngest researcher in her lab, at 17 years old, the second youngest being 25. She works in the neurology lab at the University of Kansas Medical Center, researching cortical plasticity — the brain's ability to form new connections between neurons after an injury or a lifestyle change.

“What I'm doing is I look at the slides of the rat brains in the computer, and I look for where the injuries are, and then I calculate the volume of the injury to see how severe it is and how the different treatments that we've tried have been effective,” Scott said.

Scott is currently collecting data for a research paper about the effectiveness of different recovery methods in healing the damaged area from strokes and traumatic brain injuries, and how the brain self repairs without surgery or treatment.

Scott has been enrolled in the biotechnology program at the CAA since her sophomore year.

In the past two years at the CAA, Scott has taken a variety of classes, all with the end goal of preparing for biotech research at the KU Medical Center during her senior year.

Scott has been interested in biotechnical research since working on a current event project in the seventh grade about the COVID vaccine’s development.

Even though she was interested in biotechnology, taking the biotechnology course wasn’t originally Scott’s plan for high school.

“I had no idea that it was even an opportunity for me until the end of freshman year, when my honors biology teacher, Ms. Davis, recommended it to me,” Scott said. “She told me that she thought that would be a good fit because I really enjoyed taking biology freshman year.”

Biology teacher Jennifer Davis believes that Scott is a good fit for the field of biotechnology.

“She has a very good mind of being able to think outside of the box, which sometimes in science, that's what you have to do,” Davis said.

Throughout the years, Scott has a group of eight girls that she’s taken the course with, including seniors Alejandra Ceron Madrigal and Hailey Poague.

“We're all very close to each other,” Poague said. “I know everything that's going on with them, and I feel like you kind of bond together because you struggle together.”

Both Ceron Madrigal and Poague are impressed with how Scott has progressed throughout the course.

“I felt in the beginning when I first met her, she was a little shy and kind of scared to talk out,” Ceron Madrigal said. “But now, when I had a class with her, she would answer every single question. She really put herself out in our program.”

Although Scott is surrounded by students her age at the CAA, she’s the youngest researcher in the old, brick lab tucked away in a corner of the KU Medical Center lab.

Despite the age difference, Scott feels well respected amongst the other researchers and doesn’t feel out of place.

“They don't treat me like I'm a kid, they treat me like a colleague,” Scott said. “They're trusting me to get data for a research paper that's going to get published.”

As of now, Scott plans to major in microbiology at the University of Denver and go into a career related to the vaccine development field or pathology.

And when she receives her first lab job, she’ll already know what size lab coat she wears.