We have a partnership with an organization in our community called the Business and Education Partnership. Their focus is on helping young students from grades 7 to 12 in making more informed career choices.
What we find is that the biggest influence on the career choices of students tends to be either their peers, their parents, or their guidance counsellors. Their parents and their guidance counsellors don't have an up-to-the-minute view of what career opportunities are available.
I can give you the anecdotal view of this, but what we hear when we go into classrooms and meet with kids and talk to them is that they don't realize what opportunities are available for them that line up with science, technology, engineering, and math. They don't think of those things as cool paths of study leading to cool careers.
As a result, part of the work that we're trying to do in a community sense is showing them what's possible, so we take young entrepreneurs, 20 to 25 years old, into high school classrooms, get them to talk about their latest activity—their new Internet start-up, the application they're building for a BlackBerry or an iPhone—and get kids to start thinking about something they can pursue once they graduate.
Part of it is really an exposure to industry in a way that resonates with them.