This past Friday, February 11th, was the Academic Magnet Career Symposium. Due to Covid-19, this event hasn’t been held since early 2020. The AMHS Career Symposium invites parents and other local professionals with ties to the AMHS community in to share their career paths and experiences in 30-minute sessions. Each student attends four sessions throughout the day, exploring careers across all field in hopes of determining what they may want to pursue themselves. It’s an educational and action-packed day, but here’s a brief recap from my perspective!

The day got off to a bit of a bumpy start with several scheduling errors, but after a quick trip to guidance, my career fair journey was a go. I started off in a Policy and Strategy session with Ms. Alys Campaigne. I learned a lot about the trajectory of her professional life, as she spoke about moving between different fields and interests throughout her career. Major takeaways were the diversity of jobs within this field and that sometimes videos just won’t play.

My second session was a doozy. I got placed in Finance with Mr. Louis Tick and Mr. David Pilla. I honestly had no expectations for this session, but was pleasantly surprised. Mr. Tick spoke about working in personal finance, directly with clients, while Mr. Pilla talked about day trading, which seemed like a very high-stress profession. Some of the questions and discussion had my brain completely reboot from confusion, but I feel I left with a better understanding of the field in general.

My third session was labeled as “Business” and was led by Ms. Beth Hix, an accountant. I don’t have any drive for business, but I remember that I distinctly signed up for this session to understand what exactly business is, as every third person seems to declare it as their college major. Despite my personal disinterest for business and accounting, Ms. Hix still led a super down-to-earth and engaging session. A lot of the discussion wasn’t even about accounting, but more about the flexibility of majors and careers and life.

My final session of the day was Architecture with Mr. Luke Jarrett. This session was super interesting and I feel like Mr. Jarrett was very thorough in explaining the everything I could have every wanted to know about the field. I left feeling inspired and slightly impassioned to pursue this career, but ultimately felt I lack some of the necessary smarts to pull it off. This career is a crossroads for those with affinities for math, science, and creativity.  If my work ethic were not so weak, I think I would genuinely enjoy architecture.

A couple of the major takeaways that I got from these sessions were that any experience is good experience, even if it doesn’t directly correlate to your intended career or major. A lot of these speakers also mentioned the value of internships, even if that value is only discovering your own disinterest in the field. My final observation was that it doesn’t really appear to matter what your major is in college. Not only can you change it or go back to school, but I feel like you can use any degree anywhere, as many of the speakers stressed the importance of working and learning on the job.

I want to thank the administration and PIE for putting on the Career Symposium. And clearly I want to give a HUUUUGE thank you to all of these busy professionals for giving their time to guide our career interests. I feel that this experience is really enriching if you go in with an open mind, even if you have no interest in the often randomly-assigned sessions.