First Time at Illuminate!!

Hello everyone! My name is Matt Kierstead and I am a grade 11 student at Garth Webb Secondary School. Today, I had the pleasure to attend the National High School Business Conference. This conference was designed to provide us with knowledge in CPA designations and mindsets we face on an everyday basis. There are tons of useful information I was so lucky to absorb in this afternoon conference.

To star it off, the first workshop was all about CPA designations. How they work, situations where having one is an asset in the workforce. But what I found very interesting was that even with a passion of mechanical engineering, having a CPA designation is still a skill set that is sought-after by many companies around the world. The amount of flexibly that is available is amazing and looks to be an added goal on my 10-year bucket list :). The guest speaker Jodi Buckley was very professional and made accounting look like a very fun a successful option for post-secondary education.

In the second workshop, we had university students come in a talk about “mental fitness” and the impacts it has on our day to day lives. Learning about saboteur versus sage and all the elements each on contains gave me a reality check and a mental health check. It’s nice to hear about ways our brain reacts to situation in a manner we don’t even think of.

I will apply my learning in my future careers goals as I will definitely be looking at potentially completing my CPA designation and do more research on it. I know it's relatively early for me, but it's always good to consider all your potential routes. I'd like to thank Jaime Lee for inviting me to this event as well as Rizwan and Jerry for hosting such an informative and fun day. This was my first experience with NHBC, but hopefully not my last!!