During Career Day on March 2 and 3, students will have the opportunity to learn more about the diverse workforce, listen to speaker presentations and engage with professionals from a variety of fields, including engineering, marketing, design and other health occupations.
“I would hope that students will understand that there is a plethora of career opportunities out there, even though they themselves may have only heard of a few different options that sound interesting to them,” assistant principal Kerry Mohnike said. “Within any field, there’s many jobs connected to that field so this experience will kind of remind them to keep their options open.”
This year, the event will take place over two days during tutorial. Students will go to their designated room assignments, which will be determined by the interest survey they completed in early January, in which students were able to select up to two areas of career interest.
The speakers will describe their professions and how they got into their jobs. Although the speakers will have some pointers and general guidelines to follow, they will also have the freedom to elaborate on various aspects of their life and career.
According to parent volunteer Beth Kingsley, this event could help students in planning their future career paths.
“Speaking as a parent, I feel this is one way to help expose students to different careers and ultimately help them decide their college major,” Kingsely said. “Students are often so focused on their studies and the college application process that they don't have the time or the opportunity to look at possible career options or college majors.”
Sophomore Cheryl Wu hopes Career Day will help her understand more about jobs that she may be interested in. Although she’s still uncertain about what she wants to pursue in the future, she has a variety of different interests and chose lawyer, environmental scientist, economist and financial analyst in hopes of trying to discover what she might want to do.
“I think [the event] is cool, but I wish I could explore more of those careers and that we could talk to more of the [professionals],” Wu said.
A small committee has been helping plan and organize the event. Parent volunteers Parul Samdarshi and Kingsley have been finding different speakers while guidance secretary Kathy Sheridan will sorting students into different sessions based on their requests.
Kingsley and Samdarshi have found the speakers through several ways, including reaching out to all the past speakers from the last Career Day in 2015. They have also sent out notices in Principal Greg Louie’s weekly emails and asked teachers to recommend alums, friends or family in the area. Additionally, they contacted former Saratoga High administrator Karen Hyde for alumni referrals, since she works with a lot of SHS students in her college counseling business.
Parent and community involvement has been a huge help with finding speakers, but support from the community will also play an integral part in helping the event run smoothly in March, Kingsley said.
“This event will require a lot of volunteer help,” Kingsley said. “We will need parents to help guide people with parking and where to check in, check in speakers, serve them continental breakfast and take them to the classrooms they will be speaking in.”
According to Mohnike, the school originally planned to have the event every other year so that every student would have access to it at least twice. However, because the former guidance secretary left at the start of the planning process last year, the school wasn’t able to plan the event.
Despite past challenges with planning, Mohnike hopes that Career Day will be back on schedule after this year.
“We hope that for some students, a particular speaker at Career Day may really spark their interest in a field they might pursue,” Kingsley said. “It is one thing to read about a particular field or job online, but it can be very inspiring to hear firsthand how someone chose their field of study, the career path they pursued and what their actual job entails.”
