The General Motors Student Corps is marking a milestone after five years of providing assistance to underserved school districts in Eastern Michigan.
The program matches teams of 10 high school interns with retired GM executives to plan and execute community projects. The students manage all aspects of the projects and are taught valuable skills in the process. In its fifth year, Pershing High and Detroit Collegiate Prep at Northwestern have joined the nine-week-long program for a total of 15 schools and 150 interns from the area.
“GM Student Corps helps create safer, more sustainable communities, but just as importantly, it changes lives,” said Heidi Magyar, director of GM Community Outreach and Student Corps. “With help from our GM retiree and college intern mentors, these high school students learn the value of teamwork, leadership, goal-setting and community service — lessons they’ll carry with them the rest of their lives.”
In between the project work, students attend workshops to prepare them for future careers, help manage money, and sample new career and educational opportunities. In mid-August, students wrap up work and present their final results and lessons learned to Mark Reuss, executive vice president of GM Global Product Development.
From there, the students’ retired GM mentors stay in touch and check in on grades, personal goals and provide further assistance even after the project is over.
It’s just one facet of GM’s commitment to preparing future generations for the jobs of the future.
Comments
Great! Yet another program to train “Leaders”. Very cheap with retirees and zero equipment necessary, very good-looking on annual reports and client websites like GMA. Where’s the benefit in sitting in a room listening to some retiree who is 20 years out of date, and probably enjoying social time looking at the kids? Out of 150 interns, about 6-7 of them will end up in management. Of course, meanwhile, Michigan kids have lessons from other kids who have no experience, instead of teaching from trained-&-paid professionals, but hey, they’re cost-free (Yay!).
Leadership training is both useless, and wasteful. Who cares about a room full of kid leaders all fighting it out to be the Lord of the Flies? Meanwhile, work needs doing and nobody who considers themselves as a “future leader” is going to get their hands dirty. Need Proof? Trump never had any leadership training, and he cynically fleeced wannabe realtors who think they actually need it, in his real-estate “university”. Let’s look now at who made it to Prez and who lost their case in court…
Meanwhile, Einstein/Kant/Heisenberg/Goddard/Tsiolkovsky had virtually unlimited access to SHOP CLASS. Workshops full of machines and old/dead equipment ripe for tinkering-with.
As a teacher with 25 years’ experience in Australia, Vietnam, Turkey, Romania, Washington DC and California, with government awards, industry awards, and thousands of parents’ thanks, let me tell you this FACT:
If you want to dumb-down a population, give them incessant ‘leadership’ training. From 1960-2005, US 12th-grade grads’ “A”-averages went from 18% of grads to 48% of grads. Simultaneously, 1960-2005 SAT’s gradually declined, along with US rankings in international tests – PISA & TIMSS. If you don’t see a problem here, you obviously got your “A” in 2005 instead of 1960…
Here is a proper example of what needs doing. In 2014, the Mazda IMSA prototype team would visit schools in the area of their home base, and some schools near their races. The team would arrive at the school and inspire every single child in the school, instead of just 150 “leaders”. The team comprised young (probably attractive) engineers at the top of their game. The equipment was on display, and the kids were given small trainings ON THE EQUIPMENT which inspired lots of interest in further pursuit during the rest of their school days. THANKS JOHN DOONAN. I bet Doug Fehan liked this a lot.
With help from our GM retiree and college intern mentors, these high school students learn the value of teamwork, leadership, goal-setting and community service — lessons they’ll carry with them the rest of their lives. https://www.examsbuzz.com/PMP-exam.html
That`s a good opportunity!