It's never too early to start considering a STEM-related career.

Freshmen at Lampeter-Strasburg (L-S) High School were given an ideal opportunity to conduct research and experience hands-on activities during a STEM summit in the gym Feb. 11.

Local professionals served as presenters for the event, which featured stations in chemistry, manufacturing, biology, engineering, the environment, math, technology, and trades.

"This event is designed to teach students about STEM careers," said Dawn Gerhardt, who is the director of Junior Achievement STEM summits for southcentral Pennsylvania. "We do that with our volunteers talking about their careers and these hands-on activities that we have set up for the students."

The activities are meant for younger high school students. "All of our STEM summits are geared for freshmen or sophomores," Gerhardt said. "We allow the school to select which program they use. We have programs (for kindergarten through 12th grade), and this is the one that we feel like hits that good spot for those ninth- and 10th-graders. They're trying to figure out classes to take and what directions they want to go for their future."

Gerhardt stated that the summits are designed to encourage students to think about careers. "I think they're great in getting the wheels spinning for students and for the volunteers as well," she said. "I think it allows students to think, 'Wow, maybe I should take a class in this more. I want to look into this further and have further conversations.' A lot of schools do it around course selection, so students can then say, 'Oh, I really enjoyed taking that. Maybe I should take another science class, or maybe I should look into this further, or I think apprenticeship's the way to go. Maybe I should look into a VO tech school.'"

Gerhardt added that the feedback is positive. "Our goal is to reach as many students as we can and to be as big of an impact as we can through the activities and through our volunteers here," she said. "And I think we really kind of hit the nail on the spot most days."

L-S student Nehemiah McFarlin enjoyed the opportunity. "I'm hoping that I get some opportunities that I like and find the career that suits me best," he said.

Classmate Edwin Dishart worked on coding a robot. "The basics of what we learned was what the different code blocks can do with the robots and how coding works," he said.

Ava Oplinger and her teammates won a competition where they solved riddles and unscrambled words. "There were 10 questions, and at the end, we had a lockbox that connected to one of the questions," she said. "It was very mathematical, and we learned teamwork and using all our math skills and brains put together."