Career Explorations: Connecting the Professional World With Classrooms

The past two weeks at Breakthrough Silicon Valley have been packed with career-relevant activities. Last week, we invited over 30 professionals to step into our students’ classrooms to talk about their jobs and educational journeys. Our Career Speakers represented various professions: from Adobe developers and San Jose City Hall lawyers, to banking experts at CEFCU, and marketing specialists at Google. 

Our students were exposed to a variety of careers and learned more about what engineers and lawyers all do on a daily basis.

On Friday of last week, we also invited over 20 female professionals to our 4^th Annual Women in STEM Brunch. They spent a morning with our 100+ female students and spoke about their educational journeys, and what it is like to be a female in a highly male-dominated sector of the professional world.

Last and most definitely not least, our students embarked on Career Explorations Day this past Tuesday. Our students visited over 25 different companies including San Jose Mercury News, Ubisoft, Bank of America, Microsoft, and Applied Materials.

That’s a whole lot of events to pack into an already packed 6-week academic summer program. So why is that we choose to spend so much time organizing these events for our students?

Simply put, as important as academics are in finding successful careers, being exposed to careers and professionals in the real world helps link all the classroom learning to the world outside of school. It adds relevance to our students’ efforts and helps them to be all the more motivated to learn when they know what the payoff may look like in their futures.

In order to motivate students, teachers may tell them, “If you study hard and complete all your homework, you will be better prepared for college and be more successful in life!” That’s a difficult claim to make and especially difficult for a young student to conceptualize, especially if they don’t know any professionals in their life. As has been mentioned, the vast majority of our students will be the first to attend college. Most of their family members know very little about college and perhaps even less about what it’s like to apply all the classroom learning to engineering or practicing law. All our students know immediately is that 2-hours of homework per night means less free time to play with friends or spend on the internet.

With events such as Career Speakers Day, Women of STEM Brunch, and Career Explorations Day, our students are able to not only conceptualize, but also experience what it means to be a college graduate and live life as a professional.

We aren’t the only ones to recognize the power of connecting the classroom to the real world. Other programs such as Linked Learning make it their goal to bring experiential learning into high school years. They work to ensure that students are working passionately for their career goals by learning and experiencing first-hand what those careers will look like through internships, shadowing, and other opportunities.

It is perhaps no secret that students feel more motivated to attend college when they know what’s at the end of the road. They are inspired to work harder and dream all the bigger after meeting professionals living out their career goals and learning about the hard work that goes into finding success.

At the closing of our Career Speakers Days, our Executive Director ensured our guest speakers that they have already made a long-lasting impact on our students. The 20 minutes they spent with each group has given them a brighter glimpse into the professional world and inspired our students to live within that world themselves one day. Through these events, our student get the opportunity to meet and see in person their career aspirations, making their dreams seem all the more possible.