Paul Szmal: FLX Morning continues, it is 8.38, we have sun outside our studios here in Geneva, but still clouds and some rain around other parts of the Finger Lakes region, we're at 48 right now. Time for our Scholastically Speaking segment with Finger Lakes Community College today joining us is one of their professors and chair of the FLCC Humanities Department, and that would be Jacqueline Termini. Jackie, good morning, how are you?
Jacqueline Termini: Good morning, how are you? Doing well, doing well. The FLCC program, the Finger Lakes Mosaic Collective, is a pretty interesting program and that's what we kind of want to focus on today. Why is this program important, Jackie?
Jacqueline Termini: So this is a program that allows high school and college students the opportunity to interact with the business world in a very real way. So the students are doing projects for local businesses, and they have an opportunity to really try things out before they get out into sort of the real world. But one of the biggest things is that by the end of this program, I am hoping that students have a much better understanding of themselves, what they're good at, what they're not good at, what they like, what they don't like through this sort of project-based experience and having a better handle on yourself will help you to make much more informed decisions and hopefully increase their success in whatever comes next for them.
Paul Szmal: Now this is a program for high school seniors. How many high schools are involved with it?
Jacqueline Termini: So currently, this is our first iteration. We just launched in September. Currently we have nine high school students from five different local high schools. Yeah, they're represented in Romulus, Canandaigua, Bloomfield, Red Jacket, and Geneva.
Paul Szmal: And how does this program work?
Jacqueline Termini: So the students from those neighboring schools come to FLCC. The districts are actually busing them over here. Students have an option to drive if that works with their parents, their district. But generally, the districts are responsible for transporting students to the college. They come five mornings a week. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they take a college class of their choice. And on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they're working on these projects for businesses in our area.
Paul Szmal: And what kind of skills are they developing by doing these projects?
Jacqueline Termini: Yeah, so they're really able to work on not only the technical skills. So some of the students are doing things like building websites or doing social media audits and making suggestions to businesses about what's missing. Two of our associates are creating a survey. There are other students that are associates that are doing all kinds of skills for their using all kinds of skills for their businesses. But the other thing is we're able to work on some of those professional skills that we hear a lot of businesses saying that that isn't what they see a lot. So those soft skills, professional skills, we're working on a lot of those in real time. So we have the opportunity to talk about how you write a professional email, how you talk to a professional person, how you present yourself in those meetings. We're working on all of that, as I said, in real time in order to allow them to learn from it, figure it out, move forward. And that's been one of the biggest pieces for me.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with the leader of FLCC's Finger Lakes Mosaic Collective, Jackie Termini, here on FLX Morning. I see a couple of different benefits from the student standpoint here, one of which being that by doing these kinds of projects while they're still in high school gives them the opportunity maybe to be a little bit more focused on what their college major might be when they go to college full time.
Jacqueline Termini: Correct. So any of the projects that they're working on, they do pick them initially by interest. But what they figure out is that there are a lot of different skills that are worked within each of these projects. So even if the marketing piece appealed to you on a particular project, there's other pieces to that that may not be only marketing related. So again, the opportunity to figure out these are the kinds of things that I really like or these are the kinds of things that I can see myself getting behind. Now we can have a much more informed discussion about what kind of careers then and therefore what college path is best to help you to get to that point. And that's done by the fact that they're taking some college classes along with doing these projects as part of this program. And that's a benefit to the businesses in the community as well, because they're helping to develop the next generation of the workforce.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. And these associates would not even know about some of these businesses potentially without having done this project now at this point. So some of these businesses are right in their area and students didn't even know they existed or what they did there. So now this is an opportunity to connect students with businesses, but also connect businesses to students because they are amazing. They're doing amazing things and businesses may now have a direct pipeline to a new worker or to somebody that they want to continue to partner with as they go forward as well.
Jacqueline Termini: We talked a little bit about websites and some social media auditing as a couple of the projects. What are some of the other projects that the students in the program are working on?
Jacqueline Termini: Yes. So as I said, a couple of them are doing, two of the students are planning an event. Another two of the students are doing some, are creating this survey for some market research. There are others that are helping, in fact, one of our internal programs has hired one of our associates to help with how to get the word out about their particular program. That's the hospitality program because unfortunately some high school students will not really understand what hospitality is. So the coordinator for that program, Paula Knight, has tasked one of our students with helping her to figure out how to get in front of high school students and explain to them what hospitality and tourism actually means and what that program could offer for students. So those are some of the other projects as well.
Paul Szmal: And these projects are covering a wide variety, and this is right at the inception of the program, as you mentioned, this kicked off in September.
Jacqueline Termini: Yes, yes, absolutely. Another associate is working with a local business who wants to sort of change. They run a local venue. They have a lot of personal parties and stuff, weddings and parties for families, that kind of thing, but they really would like to move into getting businesses to utilize their venues. Through that work, I was able to connect her with our local chamber of commerce. Then she realized that that business is already a member, which then opened opportunities for this business that just by being a member of the chamber that he's entitled to, now they're building off of that. They've now discovered they're actually members of the Rochester Chamber of Commerce. So with the student and the business owner that are working together on this day to day, they're stepping through each of these things to figure out what's next and keep expanding, expanding, expanding. So think about how much those high school students are actually learning right now in real time.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, I was just going to say a lot of skills and a lot of different levels being represented here.
Jacqueline Termini: Yes, absolutely. What do you feel the long-term goal for the program is?
Jacqueline Termini: So the long-term goal is absolutely to continue to grow the program, to continue to make these connections in our local community. As a community college, this is really in our mission to be connecting and to be serving our community. So the more connections that I can make between local people in our community and students, both high school students, college students, because we have figured out a way to to roll in college students as well. And again, this is in the first year. So I have lots of ideas how to keep this going and and further iterations. But we are going to be able to make those connections between students in K-12, students at the college and local businesses, which inevitably is going to benefit everybody.
Paul Szmal: And it sounds like just from the get go, the way this program has gotten off the ground has been pretty phenomenal.
Jacqueline Termini: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for joining us here this morning, Jackie. If there's a student or maybe a parent of a student that's listening that would like to find out more information about this Mosaic Collective and maybe getting involved with it, how do they go about doing that?
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. The best way to do that is to send me an email. Can I give an email address here?
Jacqueline Termini: Absolutely. You can.
Paul Szmal: All right. So that's Jacqueline, J-A-C-Q-U-E-L-I-N-E dot Termini, T-I-E-R-M-I-N-I at F-L-C-C dot E-D-U. You can also go to the Finger Lakes Community College website and look in the directory for me.
Jacqueline Termini: Yeah, there you go. Thank you so much for joining us, Jackie. We appreciate it and best of luck and continued success with the Finger Lakes Mosaic Collective.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Jacqueline Termini: Sure. It is 848 on FLX Morning.
