11 minute read
ORGANIZING AN EDUCATIONAL JOURNEY:
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Business Seminar Field Trip 2025
The annual ten-day Business Seminar field trip led by Assistant Head of School Mark Siegel has consistently been an enriching experience for Delphian Upper School students. This year, the trip included visits to various businesses in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, California. Each student on the trip had the opportunity to explore a variety of career paths, broadening their perspectives and helping them envision their future goals.
Planning such a trip involves a lot of behind-the-scenes work. Each year Mark enlists a few students to work as his assistants, earning some real-life experience before the trip has even left the hill. This year’s planning and organizing team consisted of Henry Gullo, Luna Jiang, and Lillian Su, each of whom undertook the challenge of helping to organize the trip. They learned many invaluable skills along the way. The following is a behind-the-curtain view into what planning a trip like this entails from the student assistants’ point of view, highlighting the projects they had to take on, the obstacles they encountered and the tactics they used to overcome them.
Delphian Magazine: What category of required project did assisting on this trip fulfill for your programs?
Henry Gullo: For me, it was three projects: planning and organizing, career interest, and an elective.
Luna Jiang: I counted it as two: planning and organizing and an elective.
Lillian Su: For me, it counted as two as well: one elective and one planning and organizing project.
DM: What are the requirements for a planning and organizing project?
LJ: The requirement is somewhat customizable to the project. The main thing is to use as much of the information as is helpful to you, that you learned on the Planning and Organization course, in a real-life scenario. For this project, this meant applying the reference from the course on the Be-Do-Have cycle, which essentially involves figuring out what you want to have, determining what you need to do to have it, and then identifying what you need to be to do that.
We wanted to have a successful trip, so we created lists of all the things we needed to do with Mark to have that, and then assumed and/or delegated the roles to the people who could do those things—ourselves, or the other students attending the trip.
DM: What was the timeline and scope of work for this project?
LS: The whole project started with Mark briefing me on what I was going to be doing from the beginning of the project through to the end. Then we figured out tasks and assignments and started having meetings as a group, almost daily, where Mark would assign us new tasks, and we would report on how we were doing on our in-progress tasks.
My first task was to work with Luna to promote the trip and get students to sign up and pay the fees. We made announcements to the student body and spoke with students individually to find out who was interested and convince them to join. We had to keep doing this again and again until we had enough people signed up for the trip.
LJ: Yes, for this first task, Lillian and I asked every single Upper School student if they were interested in the trip. We also made a lot of announcements on the fourth floor including doing a slideshow presentation showing how great the trip was last time we went.
We initially had trouble getting enough people to sign up. I remember we had twenty-six people fully signed up, but we needed to get at least two more. However, we only had two days left. It was a big challenge for us, but we kept promoting and speaking with anyone interested and worked constantly with those people to get them to pay the fee.
We ended up beating our target. We had thirty-three students on the trip, but we couldn’t have done that without a lot of communication with everyone.
HG: My first task was to find hotels in the areas we would be visiting that could accommodate our entire group. Then I helped to book flights for each person attending. Those things were basic.
It became more interesting when we began searching for businesses to meet with during our trip. I was responsible for sending emails and coordinating with the student body to gather any connections they had who might be interested in hosting us. Then Mark would reach out to the contacts, and I would help to fill in the time slots in our agenda for when we would visit them.
I had to estimate the drive time between businesses and map it all out to ensure we could visit all the businesses we planned to see each day within our schedule. Some of the companies were located on opposite sides of the city, so it was my job to try to maximize our time by scheduling every business in one area of the city on the same day to minimize the amount of time we spent in traffic on the bus. It got complicated, though, when some of the businesses could only accommodate us at certain times on specific days, so I had to work out the details.
Then the timetable with the accurate mileage had to be shared with the bus company so they could provide an estimate of the daily transportation cost and include it in their schedule, so they were ready to pick us up and drop us off each day at each location.
DM: Were there any challenges that came up in the planning or during the trip?
HG: Figuring out the hotel rooming was surprisingly more complicated than I expected. There was a whole staff approval chain it needed to go through, and it went back and forth multiple times, with each draft requiring more changes, until it was finally all sorted and approved.
On the trip, I didn’t hear of any major rooming issues. Everyone was pretty happy with where they were, so all the back-and-forth coordination and consideration paid off.
LS: For this project, I had to make my first-ever announcement on the fourth floor and talk to everyone to get them signed up. Being an international student, this was intimidating for me at first.
Then Mark assigned Luna and me to calling and making reservations at restaurants. Since there were going to be almost forty of us, we couldn’t just show up at places. This task was quite challenging for me. It wasn’t scary, like, “Oh, I’m not going to do this,” more like, “Oh, am I actually doing this?”
Throughout my entire time in America, I’ve mostly only been part of the school community. When I first came to Delphian, I couldn’t speak English well enough to make a dinner reservation, and now it was my job to do this for the entire group of forty people going on the trip. I felt like a “real English speaker” calling and talking to American restaurants like that.
LJ: Overall, I thought the trip went well, but like Mark warned us, even with the best planning, there are always things that don’t go as expected, which happened on the trip.
Two specific examples are that one day the bus company got confused and took us to the wrong business, and it took us two hours to drive to the correct place.
Secondly, there was an error in the hotel reservation on the first night despite all our preparation.
But as Mark had also said would happen, all was figured out, and the trip went well.
DM: How do you think this project has helped prepare you for life after Delphian?
HG: I’m so much more confident in organizing and running events or projects. I’m much better at communicating with others and getting things done, and I’m more effective at leading my peers to ensure they’re accomplishing tasks and doing them well.
Additionally, with enough planning and organization, I feel that I can plan and set up almost anything. For example, shortly after returning from the Business Trip, I planned a day trip to see a guest speaker at Linfield University in McMinnville, and I felt very confident in my actions while doing so.
LS: There are so many things I learned from this project. As I said earlier, my communication skills have improved a lot.
Also, I now have a much better idea of what it is going to be like to have a job in the future. I learned that I am able to get big projects done. I pushed myself further on this project than I had ever needed to before, to finish everything, even when it was tiring sometimes. I had to do it anyway and take responsibility for completing the project because it was my project.
LJ: This was my favorite project I’ve done at Delphian so far. I’ve learned so much by working with Mark, both as the small group of Henry, Lillian and me, and as part of the larger group with everyone on the trip.
Also, I have become a lot better at organizing my tasks. I have learned how to plan out the tasks that need to be handled and then figure out and complete the actions needed to handle them efficiently in order to make something happen.
DM: Mark often says that the trip is “life-changing.” How was it life-changing for you?
LS: I would say before I went on the trip, I had a good idea of what a visit was going to be like because of my research. I felt I already knew everything there was to know. But then when I was on the trip, I realized that I didn’t know anything.
For example, we visited a law firm and an investment company. So I thought, “Okay, that company practices law and that company handles money.” I knew everything. When we went there, in person, there were so many details I didn’t know. I was able to see parts of both industries that I would or wouldn’t want to do as a job, which I didn’t know before.
HG: The biggest thing I realized was simply recognizing how many different jobs and opportunities there are out there.
I realized that you’re really not locked into anything. There are so many different things you can do if you’re interested.
For example, I want to be a surgeon, and I realized that I’m not sure if repetitive procedures, repeated over and over again without a bigger goal in mind, would be the life for me. I think that I would enjoy it but I also really like working with people.
When we visited the lab that manufactures vaccines, the constant research they conduct to improve their products was fascinating to me. This visit helped me realize that pursuing a career as a surgeon who is also involved in researching new treatments and procedures is more in the direction I want to take my life.
Thank you to all the businesses that hosted us:
Bay Area
DaVinci Academy Parent Professionals
San Jose Chamber of Commerce
Morgan Stanley
DoorDash
Stanford University
Netflix
PeakSpan Capital
CSBio
Equinix
Los Angeles
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Extra TV/True Crime
The Young and The Restless
Wisner Baum
Derek De Vette
The Acting Center
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Justin Meldal-Johnsen
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Griffith Observatory
Paramount Studios
Studio III Marketing
