The career fair has returned with new and exciting opportunities for all. Park just had its first career fair of the year with more students engaging than ever before. The career fair is an annual tradition that allows Park students to emerge within the job industry.
Parks and Recreation Department Managers Michaela Boyk and Nikki Frederick said not only does their job bring them joy, but also the people they meet while working. They said they enjoy the community and would love to have others with the same passion help them.
“I love working for the city. It’s very community-driven. We work closely with all of our departments in the city, and especially with our schools as well,” Michaela said. “So we’d love to have those job openings at our Aquatic Park, Nature Center and summer playgrounds,”
Freshman Vicente Mendoza said he enjoys the opportunities to find a passion. He said he loves the chance to see new and interesting jobs.
“Well, there’s some interesting energies, like the police, the person that gives the return for the construction workers. I went to the police. (I saw) one the people talking about real estate and (saw) construction workers,” Mendoza said.
Junior Susannah Israel said she felt the timing was the main reason she couldn’t check out all the stands. She said she wanted to spend time with friends during lunch as well as the fact that most of the jobs didn’t interest her.
“I have biology fifth hour, and I didn’t want to miss that,” said Israel. “It was a bit inconvenient, because time-wise, I wanted to have time to hang out with my friends, eat and get to class, and it just wasn’t a very convenient time of day to be going to the fair. In addition to that, I wasn’t very interested in most of the careers they had there. Just it’s not really what I wanted to go into. It was a combination of inconvenience and it just didn’t align with my interests.”
Boyk said they are glad that there are many job opportunities now. According to her, it’s important to seize these opportunities while you can.
“It’s very important because I love my career, but I didn’t know about this career until I was an adult, and I wish I had known about these possibilities sooner in college or high school even because I would have changed what I went to school for to do this,” Boyk said. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate and teach people about what we do because I didn’t have that growing up.”
Israel said the career fair was an overall success because it is a great opportunity for students to engage with jobs they may like.
“(The) conversation with people running the booths seemed engaging. I saw that the police booth was pretty popular, which makes sense, and it caught my eye. Overall, I would say people seemed pretty engaged. I saw many people there, more than I’ve ever seen at a career fair at the high school,” Israel said.
