The upper school deans and HW Works administration announced that Career Day would be reintroduced for sophomores, following a four-year hiatus, at class meeting Feb. 7.
Career Day grants students with the opportunity to meet with a specialist in their chosen field of interest and talk with them in order to gain a better idea of what their occupation entails.
“We have a team of people working in alumni relations and we’re re-engaging our young alumni and our current students,” HW Works Administrator Zaakirah Daniels ’10 said.
Daniels also said that Assistant Director of Alumni Relations Hannah Platt ’08 was able to revitalize the connections that the school has with younger alumni to help reintroduce the program.
All sophomores were asked which professions interested them in order to best match them with someone in the alumni network.
“I feel like a lot of students here are primarily driven by college, and it’s easy to forget that there’s life after college,” Daniels said. “Besides just creating relationships between parents, alumni and students, we’re looking at Career Day as a way for our students to get in touch with what drives them to be great people.”
Sophia Nunez ’20 indicated her interest in shadowing professionals in the fields of art museum curating, painting and activism.
“Those are my passions and I’d really like to pursue them later on in life,” Nunez said. “We’re starting to build a path for the rest of our lives so it’s good to have an idea of where we want to go.”
Many students also expressed their support for learning about potential career fields.
Guy Hartstein ’20, who is interested in the life sciences, expressed his frustration with the difficulty of being chosen for an internship but said he is hopeful that Career Day will lead to more job opportunities.
“I think career day provides students with an opportunity to try something they’ve never tried before,” Hartstein said.
Emma Poveda ’20 said that she has friends at Oakwood School who have the opportunity to learn specific skills through its immersion program, which devotes two weeks of the acedemic year to experiential learning.
She said that she looks forward to having a similar opportunity to develop her skills outside of the classroom environment.
“I’m excited to get out of the school element and go into the real world,” Poveda said.
Freshman said that they are grateful that they will be able to participate in the program next year.
“I feel that it is beneficial for students to get a glimpse into what life might be like after Harvard-Westlake, and this is a great program for the school to do,” Taylor Dees ’21 said.
