Aragon hosts 2017 Career Day

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s a common question that many young adults are asked, and the Aragon Parent Teacher Student Organization’s Career Day helped students answer the question. Held on March 17, Career Day featured speakers from various professions who come to Aragon and introduce their career paths to students in 30-minute sessions.

According to the PTSO’s Career Day committee, the goal of Career Day was to increase job exposure to help students start thinking about their future careers. Ellen Ulrich, co-chair of the PTSO Career Day committee, says, “When you think about how many jobs are out there, I’m sure the student misses about 75 percent of what’s available out there, so by introducing students now to all the different types of jobs in different industries, it gives them a chance to start thinking about what they want to do while they’re in college, what they might want to focus on, and what they want to pursue after they’re done.”

Organizing the event for students took significant preparation, including calling up all the speakers, arranging the catalog, assigning speakers their classrooms, and sorting the students into their preferred sessions. Says Ulrich, “This is my third Career Day, and it is an enormous undertaking for the teachers, the staff, [and] for the parents, and because it’s such a big day and a lot goes on on that day, they don’t do it every year.”

However, because the event does not happen every year, the committee mixes things up for each Career Day.

“Some speakers are really good and got huge numbers of kids that wanted to hear them…[for example], 231 kids wanted to see the FBI lady [this year].” says Ulrich. “So in some of those cases we’ve asked them to come back, but in other cases we try to bring in some new ideas, and the people who work in the committee all know different kinds of people, so depending on who you’re working with you get a whole new group of people who are new to doing Career Day.”

This year, the selection range of speakers was especially broad – featuring 80 different professionals, including but not limited to: an aerospace engineer, a L’Oreal model, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, an Apple executive, an apparel designer, an FBI agent, a hedge fund manager and much more. Many speakers were alumni from the district. According to Ulrich, six Aragon alumni and three Hillsdale/San Mateo alumni presented.

A new, digital feedback method was used in this year’s Career Day rather than paper feedback.

Says Ulrich, “I’m very glad we provided an online method of giving feedback, because we actually received many responses. In the past, we used paper feedback and many students and teachers didn’t turn them in.”

Overall, Career Day this year has received much positive feedback from both students and speakers.

“Career day is a great day,” says hedge fund manager Dr. Joon Yoon. “It gives young people to learn about all the different possibilities out there. It’s a great thing that the committee organizes.”

Sophomore Alex Wong agrees. “I believe the event achieved its purpose and demonstrated many types of careers to us students.” says Wong. “[T]he speakers did a great job and were very informative … Also, I enjoyed the Q&A sessions because we could ask questions regarding things that might not come up in a job description, such as the most rewarding part of the job.”

Junior Meiling Thompson shares a similar view. “The speakers I had were pretty interesting, [and] I feel like this year they had more interesting speakers in general, after talking to my friends,” says Thompson. “I really liked that many of the speakers talked about work life balance and about balancing finding your passion with your career, [and] I also found it really helpful that many of the speakers talked about how high school had affected their career choices. [For example,] one of the biotechnology speakers I had took the biotechnology class at San Mateo High School, and [said] it really affected her career choice later on.”

Thompson believes that Career Day has helped her narrow down her job selection choices. “[Two years ago] I remember that I realized that I didn’t really want to do biology based on the amount of education one of the presenters had to complete,” Thompson says.

As for areas of improvement, students have mainly said that there could’ve been more sessions, or that sessions could’ve been longer.

“I think the event could be improved on by adding another session so more people could get to see most of their choices as well as adding more speakers, if possible,” says Wong.

Thompson agrees. “I thought the career day sessions were pretty short. We didn’t have extra time in the sessions that I had, and it would have been nice to have more question and answer time with the speakers … I also thought the 15 minute periods were really pointless,” says Thompson.

This year will be Ulrich’s last year heading the Career Day committee, and she has made some suggestions for the 2019 committee.

“Unfortunately, the feedback is not positive about the students’ active participation,” Ulrich says. “Most students did not ask question[s], [so] I’d love to see class time utilized for reading the catalog, discussing options with students and filling out the form; also for formulating questions … I’d love to see a teacher join our Career Day Committee, and be available to bounce ideas off of. I’d like to see more parent involvement. This is a huge job and it would help to have more people follow through by helping out.”

Ulrich concludes, “There’ve been good suggestions by the teachers for making Career Day flow more smoothly and these are things I’ll leave in notes for the 2019 crew.”