Eighth grade AVID Symposium

I just got back a little while ago from the Eighth Grade AVID Symposium for rising ninth graders. It was a pool of about 150 students from Hesperia Junior High School and Ranchero Middle School and was held at the Novack Center.

I followed a doctor, who followed a former police chief, so it was a bit intimidating getting up to tell kids about the value of a college education, especially as I was the one thing between them and their pizza lunch.

But I hammered on the theme that few people know what they want to do with their lives. I wanted to be a DJ and only a B-106 disc jockey in DC got me to go to Virginia Tech instead of the Columbia School of Broadcasting. I went on to discover I hated being stuck in a booth that smelled like BO, coffee, cigarettes and old nacho cheese, and stumbled into journalism, where I clicked. But I also created Web pages for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, did PR (and some videogame testing) for Blizzard Entertainment. While there were some questions about the journalism thing, it was, unsurprisingly, Blizzard that was the most interesting thing for them. (And hey, more girl middle schoolers wanted to talk about World of Warcraft than boys did. Go, go gamer girls!) I pimped the Blizzard Jobs page, especially its document that talks about how to get a job in the videogame industry (which I did a rewrite on when I was at Blizzard) and JournalismJobs.com and other career-specific resources.

All told, it went better than Career Day at Hesperia High School but not quite as well as reading at Topaz Elementary School. Middle schoolers, particularly hungry middle schoolers, are a tough crowd.

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