Life of a Fellow: Helen Buckley-Jones
Most folks have been to a career fair— either as an adult or while in school. However, most career fairs aren’t designed or executed with their attendees in mind. That’s not true for our students.
For Helen and the Camden High Campus team, planning a Career Fair (and a whole Career Week) starts with understanding their students’ interests and needs.
Meet Helen
Helen is a Fellow at Camden High School and Big Picture Learning Academy. She recently graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. in Sociology, and she loves to read, lay in the sun, and spend time with friends.
Planning a Career Fair
During the month of March, the Camden High Campus team was increasingly focused on preparing for our school’s annual Career Week— the highlight event being the Career Fair at the end of the month. Looking back on that process, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the different projects I worked on in preparation and how those fit into my broader experience as a Fellow this year!
First and foremost, I developed questions and created a plan for our Career Trivia booth. I was able to reuse some questions from last year’s fair, but I also wrote lots of new ones. I worked on creating a system for running the booth that was simple for people staffing it, exciting for students, and which created ways for our team to track student participation by school and grade level.
In addition, Ridhika (one of the College & Career Coordinators here) and I worked together to update and expand the materials that were passed out in student folders during the Career Fair. We designed a “How to Utilize the Fair” handout and “Career Exploration” worksheet, tools which help scaffold student skills and help them find the most useful ways to navigate the fair and interact with the representatives. We had many talks about which types of information students should be looking for, as well as what kinds of activities might be most useful to each grade. Finally, I got to do a lot of my personal favorite type of task, creating advertising materials for each of our events to be posted around the school; I’ve made several posters, schedules, and even a few big banners.
Beyond just the Career Fair, I’ve really appreciated, as a new team member, coming into a well-established site, how flexible the team is, and how interested they are in improving and fine-tuning their programming with each new year (and to give Fellows opportunities to be a part of that!). Part of this is tailoring our events, resources, strategies, and advice to the needs and experiences of the Camden community specifically. Everything from thinking about what we have available in the Plus Center (the Camden High freshmen requested hot sauce, so we spent the month of December promoting 12 Plus by trying new flavors on social media), to researching and updating our scholarship database with opportunities that are right for each of our students, to researching trivia questions about pathways our students tend to be interested in, is part of this.
In my role as a Fellow, the Career Week planning process has been an opportunity for me to expand my focus beyond advising and workshops to school-wide culture events and programming, as well as to think a little bit more about how our conversations with students influence how we run programming. As a Fellow, most of my time is spent talking with students and learning about their experiences, which is amazing, but it’s been so cool to have the chance to translate those conversations into programming that is effective, thoughtful, and which works intentionally with the communities we’re a part of.
