My Experience with Illuminate Universe's: NHBC

A Bit About Me Hey everyone! My name is Preity Vaswani, and I am a grade 10 student student at St. Marcellinus Secondary School. I was given the opportunity to attend the National High School Business Conference, and enjoyed every minute of it. I received an invite to attend via LinkedIn, and was instantly interested and wanted to learn more. Illuminate Universe's recruitment officer said I could form a team and be a high school coordinator. Naturally, I got 4 close friends of mine to register and we were good to go! Next up was creating the promotional video for the Illuminate Challenge. Once we had submitted that, we were all ready for the National High School Business Conference. There was a lot to learn and new experiences + memories I took home with me from this conference. What I Learned I made a bunch of memories at the conference, and took home new learning experiences aswell. I learned more about the CPA designation from the conference. A few cool things I didn't know about CPA Canada and the designation include the fact that you can apply with any undergrad degree (so long as you take the pre-requisite courses in college/university). I also learned that the designation is relatively flexible, and allows you the opportunity to travel, which I admire. The Post Secondary Panel In regards to the Post-secondary panel, I think it was a thoughtful edition to the conference. There are hundreds of unanswered question and concerns high school students have in about university. Being allotted a place to get the answers to those questions was very beneficial. Keynote Speakers + My Favorite Part(s) After listening to the keynote speakers, I learned about the importance of mental fitness, and ideas to calm yourself down when feeling certain negative emotions. Here is a quote I liked from this presentation:

The second keynote speaker; Jodi, was the one who elucidated on the CPA process. She also presented the CPA Competition to us, which was a blast! The CPA Competition was actually my favorite part of the conference! We got to learn a little bit about the logistics of forensic accounting, and about skills such as teamwork and collaboration! We also learned about how to assess problems the CPA Way:

The Illuminate Challenge came in a close second for me. My team and I jumped for joy when we found out we'd made the top 3 finalists quota! The promotional video was an overall fun activity, and it actually taught me so much about the Illuminate Leadership Academy - things I didn't know before.

Overview In conclusion, I'm glad I attended NHBC. It was informative and fun all at the same time! 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 I believe it is always good to consider your options. I would like to thank Aaron Guo for inviting me to this event, as well as Rizwan and Jerry for hosting the conference. This was my first experience with Illuminate, and first NHBC but definitely not my last :)!