Photo provided Bridgeport High School students visit the Cardinal Power Plant in Brilliant.

BRIDGEPORT — From fighting disease to helping keep the power running, students at Bridgeport High School learned more about their strengths, and where those strengths might take them, when they participated in field trips to different professional sites the week of Nov. 17-21.

Guidance Counselor Vicki Falcone said students were selected for the trips based on results of YouScience tests which measure aptitude.

“We’re trying to give our students as many experiences as possible,” she said.

More recently the juniors took an Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, the same type of test used by the military to evaluate knowledge and propensity for learning, so the juniors might correlate this with their YouScience results as they move close to graduation and look at career options.

Bridgeport Schools is committed to finding student strengths and opening their eyes to new possibilities. Falcone often points out: “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

With this in mind, the high school scheduled multiple field trips for freshmen through seniors.

“These are some of the fields they wouldn’t think about going into, but they have the aptitudes for,” Falcone said. “It was a busy week.”

On Nov. 18, students toured the Belmont Career Center to learn about vocational skill training available to them while in high school. Then on Nov. 19, high schoolers with an interest in the health fields visited WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital to learn about health care programs. About 39 students took the trip.

“Students got to visit the different departments in the hospital and talk with the health professionals to hear their stories, their paths which brought them to the health field,” Falcone said.

Health and Phys Ed teacher Zack Winland was one of the teachers who accompanied students to the Wheeling hospital.

“They were very interactive,” he said. “They were attentive, participating. It was a good way for them to get out into the world. Some of them haven’t really been in the hospital to see the rooms and hear about those different professions.”

He sees the value in bringing students into contact with real world careers.

“It definitely shows them different opportunities and different fields they could reach out to.”

On Nov. 20, Falcone took another group of 10 to get a close look at the Cardinal power plant in Brilliant.

“These were students who had high interest and aptitudes in engineering or advanced manufacturing,” she said. They got an in-depth tour of the process of making electricity which powers not only the local area but the wider power grid. Falcone said they were impressed by the capacity.

“The size of that generator and the amount of power that it builds, and to be that close to the cooling tower and to see how all that works. Just to hear the process of how it goes from coal into the plant, to where it goes into the furnaces and builds the steam that causes the turbines to move.”

Another group went to Muskingum University to see their accounting program and learn more about the business world. Freshman Brett Kuprowicz was among the students who toured the Cardinal plant. He was surprised when he was selected for the field trip, but was soon engaged during the tour of the control rooms, operating systems and turbine.

“It was very interesting. I didn’t really know all the stuff that it takes to make electricity. Obviously, that has a big impact powering homes, buildings and cities. I thought it was very cool, the whole cycle,” he said. “It was exciting.”

He also heard about a wide variety of options.

“There are so many jobs in the plant,” he said. “There are actually chem labs inside the power plant. I never thought of that just driving past it.”

Freshman Bryson Arno joined the tour of WVU Medicine.

“They took us in the labs, which was really cool. It was probably the coolest things I’ve ever seen. They showed us how they did blood samples and blood tests. They took us to a whole bunch of the X-ray places and CAT scans,” he said. He was also excited to see the radiology program and methods for treating cancer.

Arno has an interest in physical therapy and had several questions.

“I would ask about the schooling. How many years you had to go to school for physical therapy,” he said. He also saw the different types of physical therapy offered at the hospital.

Sophomore Deisyel Patino was also on the hospital trip and found it a great experience. He had already decided to go into the medical field but has not yet settled on what capacity. He was interested in the process of conducting bloodwork and the ultrasound equipment.

“You can use ultrasounds for different things,” he said. “That’s the main thing that caught my eye. MRIs, ultrasounds, those are the real things that got me focused.”