Volunteer parents showcase career options at scaled down Career Fair

Photo by Anamika Anand

Students learn about the career of psychiatry.

As college applications end for seniors and loom ahead for juniors, the pressure on upperclassmen to decide on a major and ultimately a career increases. To help with the process, the school recently held a career fair directed mainly at juniors and seniors, but open to all students, College and Career counselor Brad Ward said. 

There have been other careers fairs at the school in past years that involved the whole school, with presentations in all classrooms in a single day. 

This year’s event is a down version: It took place on March 22 during tutorial in the gym and was attended by roughly 80 students with around 25 speakers. 

The event replicated career fairs that happen in colleges, which can have hundreds of businesses pitching themselves, but was reduced to a high school scale. Parents who are professionals in their field volunteered to present information and answer questions about their careers for students. 

These parent volunteers presented various career paths, including law, accounting, STEM, information technology, sales, professional sports, UX design, cyber security, software engineering, dental studies, medicine, nursing and psychology. Silicon Valley Tech Education and representatives from the Marines also appeared at the event. 

Ward strongly encouraged students to attend the fair, especially to make their future choices easier. She encouraged students to ask questions like what the presenters’ typical day in their career looks like, advice on course choices or what skills they should work on. 

Coming out of the event, students gained information on various career choices after speaking to the volunteers. Many had an idea of what they were interested in and were able to get specific questions answered to solidify their interest in their respective fields of interest. 

Junior Simarya Ahuja entered the event already having an interest in medicine but wanting to know more about the specifics of the field. She spoke to a parent who worked at Kaiser and gained information about how to get into nursing and the flexibility of that career. Ahuja also spoke with the physician from Stanford, who told her how rewarding that career can be. Speaking with the physician overall solidified Ahuja’s interest in the medical field. 

“I always wanted to go into biology, but this gave me more of a concrete plan and more options for what I can do later,” Ahuja said. “There’s actually so much you can do as a bio major.” 

After the career fair, Ahuja sees various possibilities of what her career could be: nursing, clinical research or even psychiatry. 

Junior Emily Ta also had a similar experience. She went into the fair with a focus on careers business or mathematics related and spent the most time at the accounting and sales tables. 

At the accounting table, she received information about internships at big companies such as Kaiser and realized she was interested in the communications side of accounting. 

Ta asked questions such as what the professionals do in their day-to-day jobs. There were multiple people at the sales booth, each with their respective specialties in the business field, and this was something Ta found useful in regard to helping her pick a specific major in the future. 

“Even though there were two or three people at one table, their jobs were so different, and that was really helpful because business is such a broad field,” she said. “I didn’t realize the diversity there could be in day-to-day jobs.” 

Though the goal for students was to investigate a major for college, Ward pointed out that they have a lot of time to pick a career. She herself did not get into college counseling until her 30s, emphasizing that students should have an open mind to the broad variety of available careers. 

“There’s a different timeline for everybody,” Ward said. “I think there’s a lot of pressure to figure out what your career is going to be, and I’m trying to kind of reduce that pressure and say you have a lot of time to figure it out.”