roosevelt high school career fair

On Monday, May 19, 2008 I represented my company at the Roosevelt High School Career Fair. It was put on by the Oahu Workforce Investment Board and Roosevelt High School. The purpose of the career fair was simple, expose students to real world opportunities. There were 20 different presenters (here are few examples of the presenters):

Mark Matsunaga (former Honolulu Advertiser reporter/editor and KHON managing editor)

Jeff Coelho (Customer Services Director, C&C of Honolulu)

Gordon Bruce (Director of IT, C&C of Honolulu)

Dr. Clementina Ceria-Ulep (Department of Nursing, UH)

Dr. Gary Okamoto (Medical Director, Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific)

Clifford Lum (Director, Board of Water Supply)

Scott Seu (Manager, Hawaiian Electric Company)

Roy Yamaguchi (Roy’s Restaurants)

The theme of the presentation is similar to my other presentations to high school students:

Software Engineering is the best job in America (according to CNNMoney.com)

Software Engineering allows you to be creative and innovative

Software Engineers create anything from video games to iPhone software

Software Engineers work on cool stuff

There are high tech companies in Hawaii

College education is really important

The presentations went well. Although, its hard to get high school students excited, I was able to get some “wow thats cool” comments when I demoed the Wiimote Experiments. A couple of students even raised their hands when I asked if any of them wanted to be a software engineer.

thoughts

it seems that students don’t really use that much technology. i don’t think that many of them constantly chat online. and when i asked about things like myspace not much of them raised their hands or seemed really interested. in fact maybe 3 students said they did things with html. so, i’m not too sure how tech-savy the average student is. my guess is that they don’t use the computer nearly as much as college or even college-grads.

but, nearly all the students could relate to video games. main stream video games is probably our best way of connecting with students. but, it is a difficult thing to pitch because a “video game programmer” isn’t necessarily the best job in our industry.