On January 24, 2022, the grade 11 batch attended a Career Expedition Seminar. This experience gave the batch an opportunity to explore various careers and colleges from thePhilippines. During the event, students were able to attend nine talks, all done through meeting applications such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. The first two hours of the allotted time were dedicated to the career portion of the seminar. During this segment, the students participated in meetings that they pre-registered for weeks before the event. Professionals from various fields such as business, engineering, law, medicine, and more were invited to provide students with an in-depth peek of what their field has to offer. After this segment,  the students took a short break, then immediately moved on to the college segment of the seminar that lasted for almost two hours. Here, colleges from all around the Philippines, including the University of Asia and the Pacific, Technological Institute of the Philippines, Maria University, Ateneo de Manila University, University of Santo Tomas, and many others brought speakers to the event. Students were given an introduction on how life in college would be like and what the different colleges had in store for them.

Overall, I believe that the seminar went well and was very successful. There were two things in particular about the event that I appreciated, the first being the fact that it was managed and done entirely online. This allowed students to not only listen to the talks from the comfort of our homes during the pandemic, but it also let us attend more talks than we normally could. Being able to instantly switch from one talk to another saved us plenty of time. This also allowed many of the speakers to actually attend the event. If the seminar were done in a physical setting, it probably would have been difficult to gather everyone at a fixed date.

The second thing I appreciated was the guidance that was given to the all the students about our future. The career portion of the seminar helped us gain new information about certain career paths that we may not know about without doing intensive research. Furthermore, the fact that the individuals that were invited to speak were professionals assisted us in learning important and real-world information about a certain field. The segment portion of the seminar was also beneficial as it introduced us to new colleges that many of us may not have considered before. This part helped us narrow down our choices on where we would want to register for college.

Overall, the seminar definitely enabled my batch mates and I  to make more confident and better-informed decisions for our future. With college applications right around the corner, the event was an insightful and timely experience that will greatly assist us in choosing the correct career and college path.