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Inver Grove Heights Middle School Students Explore Career Day

Middle school students got a taste of everything from law enforcement and fire fighting to business and nursing during the school's annual career day.

Inver Grove Heights Middle School students got to see a Taser in action, listen to a judge and a fire chief talk about their jobs and learn a little bit about the professional world during the school's annual Career Day.

Each student got to sit in on three separate half-hour talks given by 10 different professionals. In some of the sessions, the students looked a bit sleepy. But that wasn't the case in the talk and demonstration given by Officer Ryan Prail of the Inver Grove Heights Police Department.

"I was surprised that he would actually show, shoot, a Taser," said eighth-grader Caroline Pippert. "And I was also surprised that it only lasted for five seconds, I thought it would last longer than that."

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Leading discussions were Doug McHugh, a nurse anesthetist; Joe Atkins, a state representative; Mark Johnson, a burn unit nurse; Judge Jeffrey Keyes, with the U.S. District Court; Inver Grove Heights Fire Chief Judy Thill; Dan Bennett and Ed Ambrose, engineers; Prail; Bret Nelson, a public defense attorney; Christine Hubbard, a Dakota County social worker and Bill Krech, a construction project manager.

Sometimes the questions came slowly. Other times, such as in Prail's group, the students had lots they wanted to know.

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"Have you Tasered anyone in the high school?" Answer: No.

"What kind of gun do you carry?" Answer: A Glock.

And, naturally enough, "Do you like donuts?" Answer: Yes.

Prail told the students that being a cop isn't like what they see in most TV shows and movies.

"Seventy percent of the time it's doing paperwork," he explained. But there are times, he added, when the going gets wild and woolly. "We see the bad things, but in the overall scheme of things we get to do what we like and that's helping people," he said.

Fire Chief Thill said she hoped to impart a broad message about helping your community in her talk to students.

"What I'd like them to take home are the qualities we're looking for in firefighters," Thill said. "But even if none of them ever become a firefighter, we'd like them to learn that it is important to help people and that there's a lot of people out there that care about them and care about the citizens of this community that are willing to go out and help others."

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