Marketing Me! 💼

Do you know what you want to do when you grow up? If you are already grown up, then let me ask you; Have you always known what you wanted to do? I am currently at that point in my life where I am expected to know what career path I want to pursue after high school. Our school knows it too because this year, one of our mandatory courses both in PLP and Mainstream is Careers. For this particular project, we had to make abridged resumes and business cards to market ourselves to the world. The driving question for this project was ‘How might I present my passions, strengths, and learning to the world?’.  And what better opportunity is there to market and present ourselves, than the winter exhibition? 

Creating the resume and business cards wasn’t too difficult, until I realized the amount of revisions, edits, and drafts that I would have to got through. We had to look into our visions, mission, and values, and add in meaningful information, as well as formatting our resume so that it fit the ‘abridged’ resume drafts. This was the very first draft of my resume,

and this was the final product.

Shocking how much I had to change it isn’t it? Well, that’s PLP for you. The business cards and resumes had to include the basic information of course, but we also had to include elements that represent, or shows who we are. My final business card can also be seen below.

Obviously, just having a resume and business cards is not extravagant enough for an exhibition, so we had to add some other elements as well. Unlike our previous exhibitions, in this project everyone got their own individual booths. In my opinion, this was the most independent project so far for exhibition. We were still grouped with people that had similar booth themes (health and wellness, business, tech, outdoors, etc), but that was only because we had to figure out some way to set up our booths in the most organized way. 

Unfortunately for me, I can’t decide what I want to do with my life after high school. That is why the theme of my booth was possible career choices that I might take in the future. I grouped myself into the Health and Wellness group, because for the longest time I had wanted to become an orthodontist (people who give you braces). I thought that it was a comfortable career, with steady income and reasonable work hours. That was until I realized how much school, studying, and just time in general that goes into becoming an orthodontist. I still have it as a personal career option, but I’m not sure if I want to go to another 10 years of school right after graduating. Since I no longer have a solid plan for the near future, I thought that maybe I would use the winter exhibition as an opportunity to get input from other people to help me decide what I should do with my life. Cue my audience engagement element. I chose to make a voting box so that my guests could put in their suggestions for me to look over later. 

I also had a poster for my booth explaining my audience engagement element, as well as my visual element; a cardboard dentist chair. 

Personally, I think that this was a great opportunity to introduce myself both as a learner, and a possible employee to my community. This exhibition gave us a chance to meet new people and make new connections for the future. We even had to practice our handshakes before the exhibition! Earlier on in this project, we had a guest speaker, Curt Schewee come in and talk to us about all kinds of different things to help us prepare for this exhibition. He talked about what employers are looking for when you’re in a job interview, and how important it is to make a connection with someone when you’re having a conversation because that is how you grow your emotional intelligence. He gave us a lot of good advice that I found helpful, and also ran a few exercises with us to demonstrate the skills that he was talking about.

Overall, I think that this project really helped me see a little bit about what my near future might look like, and what options are available to me. I learned many helpful things from Curt Schewee, and making my resume and business card, as well as doing some mock interviews with our teachers really helped me get an idea of what to expect from future job applications. Thank you for reading this blog post and tune in for the next one!