Preparing for Take-Off

Four seconds is all it takes to travel a quarter of a mile at approximately 300 miles per hour. No this is not in an airplane, this is in a Nitro Funny car driven by a professional NHRA driver. For work I attended my first ever professional drag race. This was the NHRA event in Charlotte, North Carolina. Our work involved student recruiting for Ford Motor Company, in the pursuit to bring back the popularity of vocational schools and fill the empty field of service technicians. We spent the weekend communicating with high school aged students regarding career paths in the automotive technician field. This is a program we have spent the whole year working on, but only activated twice so far. This was my first time being at an activation, which includes plenty of logistical hurdles including contacting and meeting with dealerships local to the race track to obtain employees who want to positively impact our youth. Below is a photo I took of our professional driver Bob Tasca III addressing a group of students in his pit area. He spent a lot of time talking about the opportunities that exist within the industry beyond working at a Belle Tire or other shop. Motorsports is where the fun is at, that is for sure.

There is a lot of on the job learning that occurs on a trip like this. Sitting in an office in meetings can’t ever teach you how to interact with student’s or how they may interact with you. It also could never prepare you for what could or does go wrong that requires an immediate judgement call to be made. On site at an event like this we do not have an hour to email with a supervisor regarding how to solve an issue, we all have an understanding of what the overarching goal is and on site you do whatever it takes to achieve that.

When you are learning on the job and working events it seems like the days last forever. Time just crawls as you try to process everything that is happening and it feels like the weekend will never end. Going forward it always feels like the next event approaches so slowly. There was a study done regarding our perception of time. Burkhard Bilger found that the more familiar our world becomes, the less information our brains hold on to. When your brain is not writing down as much information, time seems to pass by faster.

Once you make it back to the office, you get to apply all of what you have learned on site to the programs you work on for the rest of the year. I have to mention again that you will never be fully prepared to host an event in another state, because of all the logistics behind making it all possible, but in time you learn how to adjust on the fly.