Around 40 volunteers in professions including engineering, medicine, marketing, data science and business came to the school last Thursday to offer their insights to hundreds of students in the annual Career Fair held in the Large Gym.
According to College and Career Center adviser Sierra Ward, the volunteer turnout almost doubled previous years, which has usually hovered around the low 20s.
Ward realized the initial sign-ups included only one person in a STEM field. As a result, she sent out a follow-up email targeted at parents in STEM fields — garnering another 15-20 volunteers who presented.
Parent Liang Zhao, one of the volunteers who signed up in the second wave, is an electrical engineer who specializes in making integrated circuits (ICs) for various electronics including smartphones and smartwatches. When asked about what kind of advice he would give to high school students, Zhao highlighted the extreme specificity of every engineering job.
“The main concept for high school students is to learn the fundamentals very solidly, and when they go to a job, be ready to learn and pick up new ideas,” Zhao said. “What you learn now will only be a foundation, but it will make your life easier when you join a company.”
For students considering more creative fields, true crime podcast producer Esther Ludlow had different advice. She has been writing and co-producing her true crime podcast Once Upon a Crime for almost 10 years.
Starting off majoring in criminal psychology, she never imagined that she would start her own podcast one day. However, while working as a counselor at juvenile halls, she began producing podcasts as a hobby — something to destress from a job that can be very draining. She combined her passion for writing and her background in psychology to weave together interesting crime stories and explore the psychological motivations of the killings.
“If students are interested in doing something creative, make sure you choose something you are really passionate about — something you can keep doing and talking about forever and just be consistent,” Ludlow said. “And don’t worry about negative comments. You will get both negative and positive comments, that’s just the nature of the game. If you love it then other people will also love it.”
Jonathan Clark, another presenter at the fair, described his path into the field of plumbing through a 5-year apprenticeship program where he learned to build plumbing systems in different construction projects. He mentioned other benefits from the program, including free tuition as well as college credit.
Afterwards, Clark steadily worked his way into leadership positions; he now oversees a plumbing program at the Pipe Trades Training Center. He came to the fair hoping to increase awareness for this line of work — one that won’t be replaced by AI and is high paying in many instances.
“I went to Los Gatos High, and being a very prestigious high school like Saratoga, I didn’t feel like there were a lot of opportunities for trade schools and good careers that were working with your hands, and this is one of them,” Clark said. “I wanted to make sure that I could be here to present for those who maybe don’t know what opportunities are still out there.”
On the flip side, AI is a growing field that many students are watching closely. Parent Radhika Kuman is an AI security engineer who works to prevent websites from taking personal information and misusing it. She hopes to convey how dangerously advanced AI is becoming, where someone can record your voice — even just a simple greeting — and have AI generate a voice extremely similar to yours to, for example, fool your parents into sending money to them.
Despite many students’ worries of the uncertainty of tech jobs due to the fast development of AI, Kuman offered a hopeful perspective.
“You can land in a place where you can choose an evergreen job — something that stays steady over time, but you have to evolve yourself,” Kuman said. “First, attacks were on networks, then it was on data and now it’s using AI. So this evolves, but it’s always there.”
The Santa Clara County Fire Department displayed the unpredictability of a day on the job, leaving their booth in the middle of the fair to respond to a situation on campus.
Senior Jacob Gechlik found the experience of exploring various professions at the Career Fair insightful, particularly enjoying conversing with the volunteers on the nuances and specifics of their industries.
Gechlik recalls the first booth he stopped by when he walked in — one about data science.
“I’ve done some stuff with data science in the past, but I don’t know a ton about the industry, so it was really helpful to ask, ‘What is your day-to-day experience like?’ ‘What was your trajectory from high school to college to your career,’” Gechlik said. “It was really helpful because it lets me assess what I want to go into if I’d like to consider this career.”
While it is still early for students to commit to a career path, the Career Fair offers a valuable opportunity for them to converse directly with working professionals, asking specific questions and getting firsthand insight into careers they may or may not have considered before.
For Gechlik, besides visiting booths he had a prior interest in, the convenience of the fair also prompted him to look into professions he had never given much consideration to.
“I never wanted to do law because it sounded very grueling,” Gechlik said. “But then I talked to an attorney, and she said it was only really that bad if you’re doing litigation; other stuff is less taxing. So that helped me clarify a lot of the misconceptions I initially had about professions.”
