Reflection:

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     Career Day is an activity that happens once in Freshman year, and once in Sophomore year. During this day-long activity, a student reaches out to a mentor in a field that they would like to pursue, and shadows this mentor for a day. During this time, the student also has the opportunity to interview their mentor, so they can get a feel for the day-to-day job.

     I chose to shadow my mom’s cousin in law, Wes Darling. Wes works in the IT field at AlphaTEC Spine, a company that provides all the tools needed for spine surgery. At ATEC Spine, there are a few IT categories, such as programming, CAD designing, computer technician, and phone technician. Any tasks that don’t fall into one of these four categories are handled by Wes, which means he gets to participate in a lot of special projects.

     During my Career Day, I got to take a look at the average workday of someone in this position. I found that you still get to work with other people in your office, but you also have a lot of time to work on your own tasks, uninterrupted by others. While I was there, I toured the building, which was the most exciting part. I got to see the server room, which was much larger than I expected. I also learned (but thankfully didn’t see) that the warehouse stores dead bodies, where surgeons practice.

When interviewing Wes, I learned that this career takes a lot of patience, because you constantly get interrupted by new, urgent tasks. You can also easily get frustrated by all the technology malfunction. While I was there, Wes was tasked with learning how to record his screen with a certain software. Doing this was relatively easy, but I can’t say the same for turning the recording off. We spent at least ten minutes trying to shut off the recording; we googled, quit the software, and tried many other things, but nothing worked. Finally, we figured out how to stop recording, but it took a lot of patience and grit.

     Overall, I think that this was a great experience, and it showed me that I really do want to pursue this career. I feel a lot more prepared to enter this line of work now that I have some experience, and I can’t wait for Career Day next year!

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