Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) held a seminar revolving around different career pathways in business held in the auditorium during the fourth and fifth period on Tuesday Sep. 19. There were multiple speakers to talk about the five different types of careers in business.
Seniors, Mia Kalcina, the CEO of DECA and Sabrina Nur, who is on the executive board for DECA, came up with the idea of the seminar. Kalcina and Nur have both been working on their chapter management career development project which is a 20 page paper. For the project, they need to hold different types of events, so to begin the year, they chose to start with this specific seminar to help students learn things they might not have known before about the different careers in business. Kalcina explains the importance of the seminar towards students.
“The seminar was to help students learn their interest in different careers that are in business and get a little insight of what each career might entail. The different careers in business are Finance, Marketing, hospitality and tourism, management and entrepreneurship, so there is a lot of different information that each career holds,” Kalcina said.
As both Kalcina and Nur began to plan, they wanted there to be a deeper meaning to the whole seminar. Both Nur and Kalcina visited the preschool here at West and talked to the kids about how you can open up any business you dream of. Nur explains why it was important they did this.
“Mia and I are working chronologically. We are working to show that career development should be taught from a young age. So, we started with toddlers but there will be three phases which include the elementary, middle school and high school phases to teach them about career development,” Nur said.
Not all of the planning was held in Nur’s and Kalcina’s hands, Engineering, Computer Science and Business Education teacher, Tricia Brown helped guide them to the direction they needed to be in.
“I let Mia and Sabrina know that they needed to reach out to their network within the building, so the other business teachers were able to make those connections outside of the school. I taught them how to set up an event in a school to reserve the space, working with our auditorium director and requesting all the logistics they needed for this seminar to happen,” Brown said.
A big part of the seminar was the speakers and both Nur and Kalcina wanted to find people that were well experienced in a business career. Engineering, Computer Science and Business teacher, Raj Patel helped out with all of the speakers who were once colleagues of his, or people he went to college with.
As students listen to the seminar, there was a lot of information that was told by each of the speakers. Sophomore, Anthony Burns explains what he learned at the seminar.
“I learned the importance of building a network and how it can benefit you as your career develops. I think this can apply to any career in business, or just a career in general,” Burns said.
As Kalcina and Nur continue to work on their project, they hope to host some other events such as a type of TED talk with Niles West alumni, Brett Kopf the CEO of Remind.
