Career Day, according to me...

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
This is a question that is always asked to kids. It’s a difficult question to answer at a young age. At Aurora High School, however, they try to make this question a little bit easier to answer.
On Wednesday, Oct. 20, I took part in the school’s “Career Day,” where the school provides each grade level with sessions that try to make finding a job to do for the rest of your life a little less challenging.
Freshmen participated in a “Connect the Dots” activity, a great first step that introduces students to possible future careers and the potential options for schooling to attain these jobs. Juniors had the opportunity to listen to panels of speakers from different career fields such as the arts, business, information systems and others. Seniors were given the choice to either go on a college visit or job shadow. And I, as a sophomore, listened to teachers from each Career and Technical Education pathway.
In these sessions, each teacher talked about the possible jobs within their specific pathways and the classes that our school offers for students who are interested in these professions.
My only issue with the sessions was that the school waited as long as they did to thoroughly talk to the sophomore class about pathways and the classes our school offers. As a sophomore you’ve already registered for classes and have your first half of high school done or planned out. So it almost seems as if it may be too late to finish a pathway about something you’re interested in.
I felt like I really learned a lot from these sessions about pathways and classes, but I almost wish I had had the opportunity to experience these sessions as an eighth grader or a freshman. I think fully comprehending the pathways and the way they’re set up as well as the classes the pathways are made up of would’ve possibly influenced my decisions of electives to take my freshman year. I think I would’ve been more selective with the classes I took as well as taking classes that fulfill pathways interesting to me.
However, that criticism doesn’t mean that I feel I didn’t gain from this experience. I found these sessions to be eye-opening as I guess I didn’t fully understand how many elective classes Aurora has to offer. I also found it to be helpful to be able to hear from teachers in each branch and not necessarily just the one you’re most interested in. 
After these sessions, I learned that for almost, but not all jobs a student may want to pursue, there is a pathway or sequence of classes that would be of benefit for them to take in order to allow them to start gaining education and experience in what they may want to pursue as a career. As well, I found I gained more from it than I would expect because of how teachers went more in-depth and were able to share what their pathway is all about.
In conclusion, I am definitely pro-career day and hope it continues in our school as I feel it makes understanding careers and the sometimes confusing future just a little bit more straightforward.

GRAHAM CHRISTENSON  is a sophomore at Aurora High School and a guest writer for the Aurora News-Register. He can be contacted at graham.christenson@4rhuskies.org.