WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — Community members, along with college and high school students, came together at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport on Tuesday for the second annual Rotorfest.
The event focuses on careers in emergency management and aviation.
"They're going out to talk to them for potential job opportunities, and also they're coming here to look for students to join their fields as well," said William Schlosser, emergency management instructor at Penn College.
Even though this is the second year for Rotorfest, Penn College expanded the event into another parking lot with more emergency response vehicles.
"There are about 12 agencies represented here, from local emergency response all the way up to the state Emergency Management Agency—PEMA's here with their satellite communications truck," said Schlosser.
At Rotorfest, students and community members got to learn more about emergency management and become familiar with first responders.
"Not a lot of people know about emergency management, but it is a very growing field, so having all of these—the helicopters and all these different apparatuses here can really show the public what exactly it is and how interesting it can be," said Christina Smith, a Penn College sophomore.
Smith says participating in the event helps her learn the incident command system so she's prepared when she graduates.
"Different levels of the field so I know how to—when I go out into the real world and get a job, it won't be anything different. I would do the exact same thing that I'm doing here, in the real world, just on a much larger scale."
"They're getting skills that will employ them in a wide range of fields, whether it's banking risk management, whether it's county emergency management, we have students that go into private consulting where they work with different agencies," said Schlosser.
Penn College would like to have the event again next spring.