Jason Koski/University Photography

Travis North, left, helps Samuel Fis spin fibers at the Plantation's Nevins Center, during the 4-H Career Explorations conference held June 28-30.

Jason Koski/University Photography

Raylene Ludgate shows 4-H students how to weave dyed corn husks together.

Most high school students have an inkling of what it is that teachers, doctors and lawyers do. Now 470 teenagers from 45 counties across New York also have insight into what it takes to be food scientists, fashion designers and forest rangers after spending three days on the Cornell campus as part of the 4-H Career Explorations conference, June 28-30.

The middle and high school students participated in 27 workshops focusing on everything from astronomy to veterinary science. While younger students got a general introduction to the campus and six departments through the University U program, 10-12th graders participated in more intensive three-day workshops in one of 18 different fields through the Focus for Teens program.

Some took stream samples from Fall Creek to track organisms, while others tracked food-borne pathogens in strawberries using DNA fingerprinting. Students interested in natural resources got to spend a day in Arnot Forest learning how to tap maple trees, grow mushrooms and harvest timber with all-terrain vehicles. Those curious about biomedical research isolated precursor heart tissue from an embryo, then watched it grow and start to beat. The Department of Fiber Science & Apparel Design challenged students to "upcycle" two T-shirts into new fashions, book covers, jewelry or anything else they could create. Other workshops included a chicken dissection, an ecological canoe trip on Beebe Lake, a campuswide GPS geocache hunt, a rocket launch and an introduction to Holly the fistulated cow.

The goal was to introduce the students to out-of-the-box careers and introduce them to faculty and staff who are passionate about what they do, said Celeste Carmichael, acting state 4-H program leader.

"As Ezra Cornell said, 'any person, any study' -- 4-H is very much the same. Any kid, any study. Anything they're interested in, they can find a connection here at the university," Carmichael said.

The 4-H Career Explorations Conference, or some iteration of it, has been running for almost 100 years. 4-H is the youth-serving organization of Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE), and this year's theme was "4-H Feeds the Future," to celebrate that 4-H and CCE have been inspiring young people to grow food and to feed people in their homes and communities for the past century.

The theme was also reflected in the selection of keynote speaker Sam Levin, a teenager who opened the conference by sharing his experiences starting a community garden at his school in Massachusetts, and the Youth Grow Summit, which was held simultaneously.

Bethany Liebig is a writer intern at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.