The Career Fair was hosted in the Feldman-Horn Gallery April 22. Throughout the fair, recruiting sessions and product demos were available and students had the opportunity to inquire about possible jobs or internships. The companies Gnomon, Hom, and Smartwear all attended the fair.
Gnomon is a college that helps students pursue careers in the entertainment industry, often related to technology. Hom is a startup company looking to help connect homeowners with contractors to assist in the process of renovations. Lastly, Smartwear is a foundation with the goal of supporting people with mental illness through the use of data management.
Head of HW Works Kwaisi France said the career fair provides students with an early introduction to the job process, allowing them to discover any occupations or internships they might be interested in.
“Career fair is an opportunity to be exposed to three aspects of the job process,” France said. “One is how organizations go through the recruiting process. Two is actually aligning yourself with the companies that you’re applying for, whether it’s jobs or internships, which is why we have them do presentations if they want to. The third part is more practical. It’s late April, and a lot of you all are HW students, and you’re busy, and not everybody has a chance to see Mr. France during the school year . So the third is to kind of sort of set yourself up for the summer.”
Founder of Hom Catherine James said the aim of her company is to give students real job experience compared to other internship opportunities.
“It’s not every day that a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old can help build a startup from the ground up,” James said. “This summer will be our beta launch, and by the end of summer, that’s where we’d go big, and [the students] would be there in the trenches with us. They’d be building out the platform from the tech side and also from the marketing and communication side, helping us with our socials and everything else. They’re not doing coffee runs and not answering the phones for us. It’s like they are literally members of our team side by side. They can pitch us ideas because right now, everything is literally possible.”
Angus Norden ’26 said he values pursuing options that pertain to his interests when searching for jobs and internships, rather than just taking on random jobs for the sake of experience.
“High school is really a place where you’re supposed to find yourself, and I think that this is another opportunity to do that,” Norden said. “So I would see this not as looking for specific jobs necessarily, but seeing what different sectors or different ambitions or different majors would look like going into college because the end goal of college should be to get an interesting and successful job.”
Mylo-Vivar Patel ’27 said he participated in the career fair to become more familiar with the upper school community and to learn more about HW Works.
“I saw it as a great opportunity to get to know more of the Harvard-Westlake community, and the opportunities we have available as well,” Patel said. “I thought it’d be really educational, and overall, a pretty interesting experience to get a well-rounded idea of what’s going on at the fair.”
