Article written by: Jasleen Kaur (LinkedIn)

Recently, the Digital Business Student Association (DBSA) had the proud opportunity to collaborate with Humber Orientation and the First Year Experience (FYE) team to host an event for high school students. It was an amazing learning experience where we got to step into the shoes of our professors and plan an interactive, informative session about the Digital Business Management (DBM) program at Humber Polytechnic.

It took a great deal of discussion and brainstorming to figure out how to make the session as engaging and fun as possible. We came up with a solid plan centered around three main ideas. First, a presentation covering the basics
of the program like what students can expect, the fun and the serious bits, the career pathways in digital business, and key courses like Web Development, App Development, UX/UI Design, and Database Systems. We also wanted to highlight the real-world opportunities they’d have, sharing pictures from the industry site visits we’ve done so far to organizations like Google, Pinterest, the ROM, and NTN.

As we were designing the presentation, we realized ourselves just how far we have come and how much we have learned. It made us truly understand why Humber College is now Humber Polytechnic. For those who aren’t aware of the term, a polytechnic is an institution that gives its students a hands-on, industry-based learning experience. That realization gave us exactly what we needed to talk about.

We also planned two interactive activities with prizes. The amazing part was that we held this session on the exact same day as our own NTN site visit! This gave us so much inspiration. We could literally tell the students, “We just went on a field visit today!”

Then came the moment of truth…. Initially, we were expecting maybe 10 to 15 students, but we were absolutely surprised when around 30 students showed up! The FYE team told us that this was the highest turnout they had ever seen for an event like this, and that the students were very interested in our specific program. We felt so happy in that moment, and all our nervousness started melting away as soon as we began interacting with them.

Our 3rd-year team connected one-on-one with the attendees. The first part of the session was handled by Tahadil Umaiya Anab, who briefed the students on the program’s structure and learning journey. The next part was led by Tithi Parikh and Maaz Syed, who divided the students into three groups and gave them MethodKit cards (courtesy of our Program Coordinator, Hanadi Alnawab) featuring industry words related to Web Development. The students already knew a lot of terms, but the new ones really ignited their curiosity. We collectively educated them about those unfamiliar concepts, and they all got to learn a lot.

Lastly, we concluded the session with a quick, fun Kahoot quiz based on the presentation, hosted by yours truly—Jasleen Kaur! They were so engrossed in trying to answer first and got so excited when one of them started leading
the scoreboard. We proudly awarded gift cards to the top three participants.

The students were genuinely interested in knowing more about the program and asked very insightful questions. We ended the session with lots of group pictures and selfies, and handed out custom-made informative pamphlets with all the necessary information about the Digital Business Management BComm program.

This entire initiative made us realize something really amazing: just how much work goes into planning each and every lecture. It surely made us appreciate our professors even more, seeing firsthand the effort they put into shaping our futures and building our knowledge up. We hope those high school students learned something new that day, and hopefully, we will see them as first-years in the Digital Business Management program very soon!

A huge thank you to FYE and our Program Coordinator Hanadi Alnawab for their continued support and collaboration in making this initiative a success.