Career day is a blow to the ego
By By Leada Gore, Editor
They looked at me with obvious disappointment.
There’s nothing like school career day. It doesn’t matter where the school is, how large or small, or even what age students it serves, the questions are always the same.
It’s hard for the students to comprehend a job where you write for a living. For many of them, that’s about the worst thing in the world, second only to maybe getting paid to do long division.
I’ve spoken at lots of career days in my time, including one where I had to follow an astronaut. I don’t care how exciting you can make your job sound, it’s hard to follow someone who’s been in outerspace.
At each and every career day, I find myself trying to make things sound as interesting as possible.
There’s nothing worse than being seen as a career failure by a group of second graders. It’s about this time I pull out all the stops.
I bring out my camera and start taking pictures and offer the one thing they do think is pretty cool. “Let me take your picture and we can put it in the newspaper,” I offer.
They act interested and I snap a few shots. I wrap up my presentation and head out the door, encountering another career day speaker.
Ha. Let them follow that.
