On Wednesday Oct. 29, students from Mr. Spanier’s English 4AP and Avid were invited to attend the first ever Carlsbad College and Career Expo at the Green Dragon Museum.

Students dressed to impress entered the museum and found themselves surrounded by a unique combination of American history and speakers from a variety of careers who were passionate about education.

After a few minutes of mingling and introductions, Superintendent Suzette Lovely began the morning with an eye opening talk about her personal background and her unique path to completing her education and finding her passion in teaching and administration.  Dr. Lovely’s speech set a common theme for theme for the rest of the day which follows: your path will not always be straight, but that does not mean it will not lead to success.

Following Dr. Lovely were a few words from Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall who gave some insights about life after college.

Students were then split off into smaller groups and got the opportunity to listen to three different speakers from varying career backgrounds.

Bridget Ayers was one of the founders of Get Smart Web and Get Smart Workspaces and her session focused on the importance of online marketing.  She incorporated the ways she uses social media to grow her business and to hire interns.

“I’ve always been a go getter from day the beginning, and that’s definitely one of the keys to success in the business world,” Ayers said.  “Out of college I began working to help companies recover from the market crash in 2005.  I taught realtors how to rework their companies and began implementing doing loans online, this was something unheard of at the time and several people laughed at the idea but it actually allowed me to realize my skills in online marketing.”

Many students connected with Ayers and what she had to say about the importance of having an online presence.

“Personally I really liked Bridget’s session because it was all about social media and technology which is really connected to our generation,” senior Michaela Gacnik said.

The second session was quite a different pair of representatives from the company Media Tech.  Mattew Wallace and Tommy Richardson came dressed in plaid shirts, pony tails, and an interactive music mix table.  They talked about the different job opportunities in the music production and recording industry and gave students an opportunity to play around with a track that has not been released yet.

Several students were impressed with the variety the expo provided and were grateful for the opportunity to attend.

“Some of the presentations were really cool and I wasn’t really expecting them to bring what they do in life with us and talk about the fields they are in right now,” senior Lauren Streicher said.

The third session talked about a career path in engineering.  ViaSat representative Nik Devereaux talked about the real life application of engineering and how it was more than just circuit boards and computers.

“I would definitely recommend this to students in the future, it gave me a lot of insight on different careers,” Gacnik said.  “Learning from the experts and hearing first hand about how they’ve been successful was very interesting and made for a great conference.”