Blissful Business Experience

Hey readers! My name is Alexandra Teodorescu and I'm a grade 9 IB student, and I have a dashing interest in business and hope to be in this field when I grow up. On March 27th, I had the opportunity to be apart of a workshop with North York Illuminate Universe, where I met some amazing people with similar interests as me, and where I was able to get an insight on the real world from two inspirational speakers: Dan Kiernan and Swish Goswami.

In this conference I was given the opportunity to learn about how to be prepared for interviews, and the type of responses you should give to stand out and make your interviewer interested in learning more about you. I typically get very nervous when talking about myself because I'm not too strong when structuring my responses for the benefit of the other person's understanding. However, I learned how to apply the skills that were taught, such as earning credibility by talking about your experiences with big and small corporations and ending off with something that your interviewer want to learn more about. I also took away from this that choosing your career path is quite difficult and is mostly a game of trial and error, and to my surprise, most people change career paths a few times in their lives. This opened my eyes and I realized that there's so much for me to experiment with before I settle in a field that is perfect for me, and my interests will certainly shift in the process.

In this workshop, we were also given the opportunity to work on a case study with a few other participants. We were presented a scenario which required a plan for action, and we were able to discuss with our group members during the course of an hour what we would do in response to the case study that we were given.

The experience was really great, and I got to meet new people that demonstrated really great collaboration skills and who made this activity very enjoyable! Towards the end when we were able to hear four groups' response to the scenario, I discovered a few different and creative approaches to the case study, which I think were really interesting!

A part of the conference that I really valued was when the speaker Swish Goswami talked about his experiences with entrepreneurship. I, myself, want to be an entrepreneur in the future, and though I know it will be a difficult and lengthy journey, I find motivation from hearing other people's stories and their ups and downs in the process.

Overall, I had a great experience in this workshop by Illuminate Universe, and I am so pleased to have met so many amazing, intelligent, and kind people. I felt as if everyone in the conference had similar interests as me, so it was really special meeting so many great people and getting an insight from people who've seen much of the challenges and the rewards of being in their field. I had a wonderful experience and am so glad to have participated!