Prefect Council hosted the annual Academic Fair to highlight new and existing courses for the 2023-2024 academic year on March 7. Students browsed courses and heard directly from teachers and student representatives for each class. Prefect Council set up balloons along the Quad and handed out free churros.

Junior Prefect Nyla Shelton ’24 said Prefect Council wanted to reduce the stress of choosing courses at Academic Fair.

“We usually like to bring in like some sort of snack,” Shelton said. “This year, we brought churros just to make [Academic Fair] more of a fun experience because [choosing new classes] can be stressful. We also brought in balloons to just make it more of an event and a community time.”

Shelton said it was difficult to decide what existing courses would be exhibited at Academic Fair.

“The hardest part about Academic Fair is figuring out all the new courses,” Shelton said. “Obviously, we want to introduce all the courses students are thinking about [for] their schedule next year, but especially we want to emphasize the new courses that we’re introducing into the curriculum.”

Middle School History and Knowledge Integration and Tools for Success (KITS) teacher Elias Solano said he thought it was helpful that students helped advertise his new California Studies course.

“[My previous students] started talking about my course and promoting it to kids that I’ve never met,” Solano said. “I think it benefitted my course to gain more interest or possible interest from students that have not taken any of my ninth-grade history classes at Harvard-Westlake. I feel like students trust students, so I think having those students is going to hopefully greatly benefit enrollment.”

Solano said the setup of Academic Fair allowed students to access all new and existing courses and easily get information.

“[Academic Fair] started in Chalmers [Hall] and then all the way down to Munger, so I think that’s a testament to all these courses that are being offered,” Solano said. “I think it’s really awesome. That was a great way of sort of having the kids sort of go from one end to the other and just look at the names of the courses and, if they were interested in a specific topic or course title, they [would] go and ask the teacher. I thought that was great.”

Omar Rivera ’24 said being able to meet and talk to teachers and student representatives was a helpful addition to Academic Fair.

“I already had some idea of what [classes] I wanted to take, but Academic Fair just reaffirmed what and why I wanted to take a class,” Rivera said. “[I learned] who the teachers were and what classes to avoid based on the teachers teaching them. [I] also got to learn about the homework load and the difficulty of the class from not only the perspective of the teacher but from the students as well.”