My Illuminate Experience

Hi everyone! My name is Mateo Gjinali, and I am a grade 10 student at Upper Canada College. Today I had the pleasure to attend the National High School Business Conference. Here's what I learned and my overall impression about the conference as a whole.

The first thing that we learned was through a lecture on forensic accounting. Here we learned about the inherent versatility and importance of accounting. For example, he was responsible for deciphering discrepancies in a kingpin's bank account and aiding with the prosecution. I saw how useful it was for law enforcement - and yet, that it could be super dangerous, and that the guy didn't use social media, so that he couldn't be tracked.

We then had a workshop about mental health and how crucial it is to exercise and control the different parts of our brain - and how properly managing our internal emotions is crucial for a healthy lifestyle, and success in general. We also learned about the importance of soft skills at our jobs, and how not having soft skills can be devastating for career prospects. We also got to do a 15-20 min Q&A session with uni students that informed us on prospective summer choices to add to our applications, and about their own experiences at university.

Finally, we got to do the case study, where we put our forensic accounting skills to the test, and had to find discrepancies across receipts & internal company logs to find fraud. That makes for a great experience with getting to learn about something, and then use those skills in our own "scenarios".

Overall, the whole experience was great and I thoroughly enjoyed myself! I would definitely recommend it to others!