05-04-2025
'All of the innovation': Students get hands-on experience at annual STEM Expo
Thousands of students streamed past robotic dogs, drones and all manner of advanced equipment Friday at a STEM and career fair in southwest Bakersfield, where more than 100 vendors tried to entice young people into future careers.
Now in its fourth year, the Kern County Career and STEM Expo is a joint effort among the Kern High School District, Kern Economic Development Foundation, Chevron and other local partners to highlight Kern County as a destination for STEM jobs.
"The goal is to have this cross-pollination, (to make) these students aware of potential pathways," said Richard Chapman, executive director of the Kern Economic Development Corp., one of the groups that helps host the expo.
"This is about talent retention," Chapman said. "And for the employers to kind of be wowed about the students that could be their future employees."
Roughly 3,400 Kern High School District students walked past 140 exhibitors at the expo, a combination of colleges, local government agencies and a range of private companies looking to interest students in potential careers.
"It's really cool to see all the tech, even a robot dog and they had a Corvette," said Sawyer Orrel, a freshman at Independence High School. "It's really cool to see all the technology and things that other people are interested in as well."
Orrel said he is interested in biology or possibly some kind of design engineering. "Fighter jets and stuff," he said.
Another Independence freshman, Matthew Temple, said he wanted to go into aerospace engineering and hopes to attend the California Institute of Technology.
"There have definitely been a lot of things I have liked. I have been here before and I thoroughly enjoyed it," Temple said. "All of the innovation and all the science that goes on, it's very interesting."
The expo was held at KHSD's Career Technical Education Center on Old River Road in southwest Bakersfield. Between the CTEC and the Regional Occupational Center, the district offers 38 courses to about 2,700 students a year, according to Principal Brian Miller.
Miller said various health care programs are in the highest demand, followed by the skilled trades such as welding, automotive and construction.
"We do a follow-up study on those students six months after they graduate," Miller said. "So our 2024 grads, about 70% of them are in post-secondary education, and of those, about two-thirds are continuing the pathway that they started at CTEC."
The two centers receive about 6,500 applications for 2,700 spots that go mostly to KHSD students, along with a small number of charter school students, Miller said. Educators at the center come from industry background, and the center tries to be flexible in its curriculum to respond to local labor demands.
The expo also brings employers to the CTEC campus, a roughly $60 million project completed in 2020, where they can see what's offered.
"We're always trying to adapt to make sure that what we're teaching is relevant for the industry," Miller said. "Things like electronics and automation, those are new skills that have come up the last few years where we really implemented that in a lot of our skilled trades programs."
