careers |

Our grade 10 and 11 students are eagerly participating in Career Day this week. It’s something we have done for a long time—long enough for the ground to have actually shifted from under our feet. It has always made sense for students to aspire to traditional professions: lawyer, doctor, engineer. However, the concept of career has changed and fragmented a great deal in the past decade. Young people should no longer expect a long career with a single firm or institution. Change and transience are now the norm. We have also learned a lot from university dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that has shattered well-entrenched notions of success.

With the development of the Internet, businesses, governments and learning institutions can now communicate directly with potential clients. Ingenuity and new digital tools have essentially redefined the world of work. Yes, there is still a need for traditional professions. However, even those professions are having to adapt.

As we move forward, noted Harvard educator Tony Wagner in his book, The Global Achievement Gap, stresses that it is now less about preparing for a specific profession and more about teaching and refining the following core skills:

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Collaboration across Networks
Agility and Adaptability
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Effective Oral and Written Communication
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Curiosity and Imagination

—Christopher Shannon, Headmaster

Last Tuesday, LCC’s grade 11 enriched physics and chemistry class went to the Montreal Neurological Institute for an exciting day of seminars and presentations given by doctors, researchers and grad students. Along with approximately 300 students from Montreal-area schools, we participated in the annual regional edition of the TD Discovery Day. The Discovery Day is a program funded by TD Bank that gives students from across Canada, who are interested in pursuing careers in health sciences, the opportunity to visit hospitals and also talk with doctors and other health care professionals to get a better sense of what the field is actually like.

In the morning, upon our arrival, we sat down in a large auditorium at the Neuro to listen to the chairman of the Discovery Days program tell us about the goals of the program. She then introduced the first keynote speaker, Dr. Phil Gold, who talked about his career as a doctor and about how he got into medicine. After that, we attended our first seminar session, of which there would be two. My first seminar was called “Anatomy of the Human Brain,” and it proved to be very interesting. It was taught by four McGill neurology students and for an hour and a half they lectured about the brain and the various functions of the different cortexes, or zones. At the end of the seminar, we even had the chance to touch a real human brain and see what the different cortexes actually look like in real life. That was really cool!

After lunch, we attended our second seminar, which was given by a speech pathologist who spoke about speech impediments and, more specifically, how to treat them. We got to see and touch all of the various devices that speech pathologists use to do their jobs, such as artificial larynxes and text to speech converters, which was very interesting. When that was over, we returned to the auditorium for a final keynote. It was a panel of five health professionals who talked about their jobs and listened and responded to questions asked by the audience. This was cool because we got to hear about the daily lives of real health professionals and ask them questions about their jobs.

At the end of the day we returned to school, wiser, more experienced, and, for some of us, more passionate about what we want to do with our futures. — Giulian Etingin-Frati ’12

Tag Archives: careers

Career Landscape

Discovery Day at the Montreal Neurological Institute