Illuminate x Markham — My Amazing Experience

Hi everyone! My name is Pranav Varma and I am a Grade 11 student at Markville Secondary School. Today, I had the pleasure to attend Illuminate x Markham’s regional conference. Here are my thoughts highlighting what I learned about international business & cybersecurity.

Speaker Workshops: I enjoyed the speakers talk and I thought all the guest's workshops were very thorough as well as informative. The first lesson on theory of change allowed us to critically analyze the root cause of problems and work backwards in order to find the solution. We then learnt how to apply this into our real lives using a lens of international business. One of the things I especially liked was that the information taught during this session is all transferable skills, so I would be able to apply it into non business fields as well. As a part of the second workshop we learnt about cybersecurity, but the key takeaway was not exactly how to protect computers; rather, it was to explain the importance of hard work. This was another situation where I learnt something that I could apply to my everyday life.

Case Competitions: The case competitions were very refreshing and unique compared to other case competitions such as DECA because we were allowed a lot more leeway and only given a general idea of the prompt. This allowed everyone to take their solutions in a different direction and all of the answers would be completely different. (Compared to DECA or other competitions where most of the answers are very similar) It was also made more interesting by giving longer prep times (a week beforehand) because it allowed for a lot more creativity and expertise to be shown off.

To conclude, I learnt a lot from this experience, and I am really glad that I attended! I look forward to reaching out to the workshop speakers & for what Illuminate does in the future.