From left, Halen Latham waits for more students as Daylaon Patterson and Ja’Kobe Murray, all carpentry students at Columbus High School’s McKellar Technology Center, practice drilling screws into a wooden block Thursday during the FORGE Your Path Career Expo. More than 2,000 eighth-grade students from nearly 30 schools across nine counties attended the expo this year. Emma McRae/Dispatch Staff	
			Four years ago, Halen Latham attended the FORGE Your Path Career Expo as an eighth-grader. This year, the Columbus High School junior returned this week alongside other carpentry students from McKellar Technology Center to show this year’s participants the basics of carpentry.
Watching as the eighth-graders practiced drilling screws into a block of wood, Latham said her favorite part of being back is teaching the students.
“It’s like when you don’t have experience, it helps them even if they don’t take the class,” she said. “It’s something you can do in life. … (These are skills you can use) for anything that you have.”
Now in its seventh year, the expo brings together more than 2,000 eighth-grade students from nine counties, 40-plus trade partners and more than 500 volunteers for two full days of interactive activities designed to introduce them to careers in skilled trades.
“These kids are laying brick, finishing concrete, driving the mini excavator, they’re learning about irrigation systems,” Melinda Lowe, executive director for FORGE, told The Dispatch. “It’s just a lot of new things that have been added that have just really elevated the experience, and we’ve loved that.”

			
			
				
				Melinda Lowe
				
		

That hands-on format is exactly what makes the expo stick for students, especially those like Aniece Hill, from Armstrong Junior High in Starkville, who says she’s a “very hands-on person.”
Hill took particular interest in an activity hosted by Graham Roofing where students tried their hands at using hot air to fuse together thermoplastic polyolefin similar to how it would be done on a commercial roof.

			
			
				
				Parker Knight, with Graham Roofing, left, helps Aniece Hill, an eighth-grader at Armstrong Junior High, as she practices fusing together thermoplastic polyolefin Thursday during the FORGE Your Path Career Expo. More than 40 trade partners and volunteers participated in the expo this year to bring more than 60 hands-on activities to students in hopes of introducing them to careers in skilled trades. Emma McRae/Dispatch Staff
				
		

“I think it’s good because I get more experience on other jobs than just the normal ones we see every day,” Hill said of the expo.
Lauriel Gibson, also from Armstrong Junior High, said the expo is helpful to students trying to make up their mind about future career paths.
While she was too scared to try driving the remote-controlled robots, Gibson said she especially enjoyed the nursing station hosted by Millsaps Career and Technology Center.
“We had to stop the body part from bleeding,” she said. “We had to put pressure on it. I just like learning about health stuff.”
As the expo has grown, so has its reputation among students and local employers, Lowe said.
“When they see FORGE, they now have a better understanding of what it is, who we are, what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and that’s been so exciting,” she said. “Out in the real world, you’ll see a student in a yellow high-vis shirt, and you immediately know they’ve been to Expo. It’s starting to click. People get it, and the students are really starting to understand.”
This year was the first ECON Construction joined the expo, bringing along rebar tying and concrete finishing stations that were big hits for students. General Superintendent Gill Lucas said he was “overly impressed” with how involved students were.
“What got me was more girls would come up and be excited about getting their hands dirty,” he said. “That was exciting.”

			
			
				
				Gill Lucas
				
		

Lucas said the expo goes a long way in showing students they have options beyond a typical desk job when it comes to their careers.
“We’re losing people in that industry day in and day out,” he said. “It’s because they just aren’t exposed to it. Their parents don’t do it anymore, and … who else is going to teach them? So I think organizations like this are needed all across the country.”
FORGE, which stands for Family Organizations Recruiting Great Employees, was founded in 2018, and while a national expansion isn’t yet in the cards for the organization, it recently expanded to include a Northeast Mississippi chapter.
“We’re working hard at getting Northeast done right, really supporting them, figuring out what a chapter looks like, how to support them best, how to get their initiatives going and that type of thing,” Lowe said.
Next week, the newly created chapter hosts its first career expo in Tupelo. Once the Northeast chapter is solid footing, Lowe said FORGE plans to grow further.
“Then we’re going to start branching out more,” she said. “We are looking at Central Mississippi … but we’ve pumped the breaks just a little bit because we want to do it right. When we go out and promote and recruit and become a new chapter, we just want to make sure it’s done right.”
			
						
			McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.			
			
      
      
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