To develop their professional skills, students in the Prosper Career Independent Study program visited the Toyota Plano National Headquarters and held a symposium Dec. 9.
“PCIS is a class for upperclassmen that teaches you about your desired career field,” PCIS II student senior Sofia Popal said. “It also helps you make connections in that field while developing professional etiquette skills.”
The symposium was held after students in the program worked on their professional skills for the semester.
“The symposium is an event where students can meet and network with people in their desired career field or adjacent career fields in order to gain a deeper insight,” Popal said. “We put the professional skills we worked on over the entire semester in practice.”
At the symposium, students put the professional skills they’ve worked on in class into practice.
“We want to give the kids a chance in a real-world setting to learn how to network in a safe space so that they can feel comfortable and confident with a group of people who understand that these are high school kids learning about networking and reaching out and being professional,” PCIS teacher Tiffany Ballard said. “We want to do that in a space that they feel like they’ve got low risk, but then they are able to walk away with some real connections.”
PCIS students were required to prepare before the visit to the symposium.
“Their suits had to be ready, their digital portfolios had to be ready, their interview skills had to be ready, they had to prepare questions, they they had to do cold calls, and they had to send proper emails,” Ballard said. “There was a lot of work beforehand, and then, once they were there, they were tasked with reaching out and connecting with people and being able to walk away with two to three solid leads and people they could go home and connect with professionally.”
PCIS 2 students did the planning and coordination for the symposium. Students who took PCIS for a second year focus on leading and guiding the first year PCIS students. Popal served as head of recruitment and had to recruit experienced professionals to talk with students at the symposium.
“It was a lot of communication, especially because there were people from all three schools in the district planning it,” Popal said. “It was a lot of figuring out how to best reach a person because some people will never answer their phones, but they’ll answer emails immediately. It was also a lot of meeting with an executive from Toyota.”
The symposium used to be held in the Children’s Health Stadium Community Room, but the PCIS program grew too large for that room. Now, it is held at the Toyota Plano National Headquarters.
“I was talking to a friend of mine that works at Toyota, and I was saying how I hate that we outgrew the program,” Ballard said. “She told me we might be able to hold it at Toyota. The whole origin of the symposium being there was an aspect of networking that brought that about.”
After arriving at Toyota, PCIS students toured the campus.
“They got to see a general layout of the building where the event was taking place in different areas of Toyota,” Popal said. “Students then got breakfast and first met the professionals. They practiced networking while eating, then we went into this giant room and listened to presentations from a Toyota executive, Dr. Ferguson, our PCIS teachers, and then me and Audrey Bledsoe from Walnut Grove.”
After the tour, students separated into groups based on their prospective career fields. The four groups were STEM, business, medical and law. Finally, the students reflected on their time at the symposium.
“I was running the business room,” Ballard said. “We ran three separate ‘speed-networking’ events, where professionals would sit with anywhere from three to 10 students and answer questions one–on–one when the students had questions for them.”
Although Ballard said the symposium went well, she wants to change aspects of it next year.
“I would love to be able to have it be a little less chaotic when all the groups are coming in, so I’d love to be able to streamline that process even a little bit more,” Ballard said. “Also, the students love the free networking time, and I don’t feel like I ever build enough time for that in there. I’d love to be able to look at the actual logistics of the day and plan a little bit more time for that.”
PCIS I students Sai Charan Tej Gadham Setty said he will use the skills he learned at the symposium in the future.
“I was able to learn a lot of networking skills, professionalism skills, and a lot of other technical and soft skills that could help me in the future,” Setty said. “They could help me get better chances of acceptance when applying to jobs, internships or other job-related activites.”
Through PCIS, Ballard emphasizes the importance of professional skills.
“We’re in a job market now where if you just blindly applying for a job, you are not going to get that position,” Ballard said. “Internships are your gateway to landing those jobs, and internships will only happen if you know how to properly network yourself and reach out for those opportunities and learning that your network could just be asking your parents who they know. That starts with your family, and then it extends to a group of friends, and then it could go even further, to classmates, to a professor, and then it really falls on a student to start being an advocate for themselves.”
Ballard said she wants the biggest takeaway from PCIS to be networking skills that students can use in the future.
“When you leave PCIS, you are well equipped to say, ‘I know next year, when I go to school or when I go off to the workforce, I know I’m gonna reach out and find a mentor,'” Ballard said. “‘I know how to ask them questions, and I know how to have them help me succeed.'”
