Palo Alto High School’s annual career speaker presentations are set to kick off next Monday as part of this year’s Career Month.
The career speaker series, which will be held in the English Resource Center and Social Studies Resource Center during lunch, begins the week of March 18 and runs through March 29. The speakers will be giving presentations covering a wide variety of fields including business law, journalism, medicine, politics, real estate, culinary arts, auto repair, interior design, professional sports coaching and much more.
“The goal of the career speakers is to provide many different perspectives and vantage points of people who have already gotten to the sweet spot of success,” Paly Career Advisor Christina Owen said. “The sweet spot is that they’re doing something they love, they’re making a living that has worked for them and they’re doing something they’re really good at.”
Owen also hopes that the career speakers can give students a broad vision of opportunities, rather than fixating on one specific goal.
“Sometimes we get caught up in the idea of success as arriving at a specific place, or getting into a specific school or that there’s only one career for me,” Owen said. “But there’s much more than that. It’s kind of a vision of reality for our students.”
This year’s lineup features plenty of notable figures and, for the first time, Paly students will be included as career speakers. Senior Adrian D’Urso and junior Freddy Kellison-Linn will be talking about their experiences as the founders of JailbreakNation.com, a technology website consisting of news articles, videos and iPhone jailbreak downloads.
“That is someone who pursued something that they were interested at a early age,” Owen said. “Now it opens doors for them and they can use it as a springboard into other things. I really believe they can empower other students to start finding out about opportunities and careers now, rather than waiting to complete a structured education.”
Kellison-Linn also expressed his motivation for being featured as a career speaker.
“I think that Career Month overall is a great way for students to learn about potential life paths,” Kellison-Linn said. “Entrepreneurship is a valid path, so when we were contacted by the people putting Career Month together, it seemed like a great opportunity to represent what exactly it means to be an entrepreneur.”
Free lunch for the first 250 students and entry into an iTunes gift card raffle are added incentives for students who choose to attend career speaker presentations. This year, there will be no sign-ups and food will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.
For more information on specific speakers and their scheduled presentation dates and locations, click here.