Driving Question

“How do I support my career life choices?”

For centuries, currency has been used to support our financial systems. Rocks like gold and silver, though they had no nutritional value (don’t try this at home kids), were held to value. 

Last time in Careers, we learned how to market ourselves and apply to job opportunities. However, we didn’t learn how to budget the money we would get from those potential jobs. In our latest project, we learned how to budget for reality and manage our $$$

First off, this was something we did before this project, but I forgot to mention in my last careers blog post. We thought about our future careers… what we will accomplish in our futures. This is where I had my 1/1000000000000+ life crisis (not mid-life crisis, because I’m an immortal being.) 

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Especially in my high school years, I’ve always wanted to work in the animation industry. However, I haven’t really thought about it too much, like how will I support myself post-secondary? Are there jobs available in Vancouver for animation? Would I have to leave Canada? How will I even be able to afford my post-secondary education?

Though this activity was something we did at the start of Careers, I think it really resonates with this portion of the project: Finance. Will my choices be able to support me later on?

We learned this through understanding “Financial Literacy.” To do this, we participated in a variety of interesting activities. 

We started off by doing an Uber simulator. The task was to understand what a “Gig Economy” was and see if it’ll work for us. Through this assignment, I learned that the gig economy allows for more flexibility and independence. However, it doesn’t leave room for much security. 

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Personally, I don’t think the gig economy is for me. I especially learned this through completing the simulator, which really showed me how tough it is to work in such a variable economy. You can read more about my thoughts on this by clicking the image above.

We also started thinking about budgeting and goals. 

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We accounted for the things we spent our money on in the past month, and whether or not our regular income could support these spendings. This activity was pretty eye opening, because we also had to record the things our parents spend for us (streaming services, data, food, living, etc). My current income, which usually comes from occasional babysitting and random services, wouldn’t be enough to cover them. 

To understand financial literacy in the real world, we watched “Moneyball.”  

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Ahem. From a movie nerd standpoint, I enjoyed this movie! And it wasn’t just because Brad Pitt was in it, ok! Even though I didn’t know much about baseball (besides what my little league coach dad tells me), I was able to still understand what was happening. I found the focus on the business side of sports pretty unique and interesting for a sports movie! It even kept the “underdog” story (and we all know how much I love underdog stories.) 

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We also tried out a personality test to understand ourselves better and how we might fit into the workplace. I got the “advocate”… like Obi Wan from Star Wars… Ava Wan Kenobi? That’s true from a certain point of view.

Next up, we dabbled in some stocks… (FAKE STOCKS, THEY WERE FAKE. I’M NOT HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS IN DEBT, TOTALLY.) We used this cool simulator app called “Stock Sim.” 

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Going into this “challenge” (whoever in the class got the highest stocks, wins a $20 gift card) I wanted to be in it for the long run. I took a very conservative approach, because loosing money really scares me… even though it isn’t real money, I was still terrified of being in debt.

I started off… not strong. I decided to invest in some Apple stocks, because we’re PLP iPad kids after all. Anyways, I didn’t realize that the stocks were high when I bought them, so I instantly put myself into debt without even knowing it.

It was a long learning process, but through some research and more loosing, I finally made it out of debt… AND I GOT $100+ Even though I wasn’t even close to winning that gift card, I was very proud of myself and I was able to actually make some fake money!

For this year’s spring exhibition, our class presented work from both “Marketing Me”, this Careers project, and our podcasts. We spent the night pitching our podcasts, in which I experienced many interesting interactions (really, I think I scared some poor woman off with the mention of corpse desecration.) 

If you didn’t know already, my podcast was on folklore (vampires and witches and stuff), hence the corpse desecration. We all made little business cards for it. Here’s mine…

I also included a link to my instagram, where I advertised my podcast a bit. By the end of the night, I’d talked to so many people. Even though I was terrified at first, pitching my work got easier as time went on. I even got to decorate my “desk” (our room was themed like an office and we all got cubicles where we could set up our marketing stuff). I raided the Halloween stuff and even my plastic bird skull finally came to good use… it’s a pretty cool fake bird skull. 

Though it was a kinda rough start, I think our exhibition was successful. I got to share my work with so many people, and it was cool to finally get to talk about it!

Anyways, I’m exhausted and summer is right around the corner (literally the last day tomorrow), so I’m going to end this here. How do I support my career life choices? Well, financial literacy and understanding how to handle my money responsibly is a good first step! Though the future can be big and scary, if I just take the time to plan it out and make prepared decisions, I shouldn’t need to worry about it too much.

That’s the end of this blog post! See y’all again next time!