Host Joy Walczak speaks with Kenny Vi, 12th grade, KCTC Marketing + Design, Kent ISD Communications Intern, Allen Kaatz, Instructor, KCTC Marketing + Design, and Edith Reyes, Kent ISD Communications.
—-
Full Transcript:
Joy Walczak (JW): Welcome to the Your Dream Is Our Dream podcast where we celebrate student success one dream at a time.I'm Joy Walczak and today I have with me Kenny Vi. He's a senior at Kelloggsville High and Allen Kaatz who is Kenny's instructor for Kent Career Tech Center's Marketing + Design program. We're also joined by Edith Reyes of Kent ISD's communications team where Kenny was an intern this year. Kenny, I'd like to start by saying congratulations, you are about to graduate.
Kenny Vi (KV): Thank you so much.
(JW) It's such an honor to have you here and we really do congratulate you on your success. Tell us about your high school career.
(KV) My high school career is practically me playing tennis for all my four years. I was able to get first singles so practically I'm the number one player on the team every single time and then I was also captain for three years and then I was also got the opportunity to go to Frederick Meijer Gardens and do their business hall of fame and be their emcee for two years.
(JW) Those are incredible achievements.I understand you have also done some work with your athletic department at your school.
(KV) Yes, I’ve done a couple things. Also, just recently, well, in the last two years, I started a volleyball team for boys and then now the state has unlocked it for everyone.
(JW) That's another incredible achievement. Great job. Are you going to continue your athletics in the future?
(KV) Yes, I'll be playing at Alma College for tennis.
(JW) Another terrific achievement. Good for you. I'd like to get to Mr. Kaatz, you are teaching a program here called Marketing + Design, and Kenny started taking that program. Tell us about your program.
Allen Kaatz (AK) Our program goes through and will create a variety of different items, and they're basically going to be a promotional item for marketing purposes.So, we're teaching the fundamentals of the graphic design, the principles and the elements, typography, and we're also embedding all of the state-of-the-art software from the Adobe Creative Suite. So, the students came in and we started with Photoshop.I did that for give or take nine weeks, moved on to Adobe Illustrator, and we skimmed the top of the InDesign software as well.And again, a lot of what we were doing was building some promotional items for some marketing campaigns.
(JW) That is real world experience. Kenny, what interested you in taking this program and being part of Kent Career Tech Center?
(KV) So, what interested me is that I want to go into business administration. And I always thought of it like you have to understand every single part of a business and like the backbone of a business. I think it's marketing mostly because that's how you get your audience. That's how you sell your product. So I always want to be interested in marketing a little bit.
(JW) What were some of the projects you worked on this year in that program that really worked well for you that you really enjoyed?
(KV) I enjoy learning all the Adobe stuff. uh Well, my favorite right now is Illustrator. Then recently, we just made a couple of products like business cards. We made like a cereal box, milk carton, and we are right now just making whatever product we would like. And I'm right now doing a study kit.
(JW) Those are practical skills that you can take into the workforce in the future if that's what you choose to do.You also took part in an internship. Tell us about that.
(KV) Oh, that internship I have done for about a year and a half here at KCTC. I was a marketing intern doing social media, like for TikTok, Instagram, there were the school website and Facebook. And it was a wide perspective for me because I wasn't used to like handling social media uh in that way and doing, going to random classes and meeting new people and just help me with my confidence and learn that marketing is a lot more than I really thought.
(JW) We were very lucky to have you as an intern in Kent ISD's communications department. Edith, you were his internship supervisor in this role. Tell us how you feel Kenny has grown and really become part of our team.
Edith Reyes (ER) I think he already mentioned that his confidence um grew a lot. I remember when I first met him, he wasn't very talkative. But now he's just like always having conversations with us. That's great. Even just like walking into different classrooms too, not just the programs that he was familiar with, but just the new ones all around um the different hallways that he wasn't into um that school year. So um definitely his confidence, his creativity, and just the willingness to meet people, too.
(JW) And that real world experience. What aspects of our business was Kenny able to really experience and take to a new level on some of our social media platforms?
(ER) Yeah, so TikTok was something new that we did a couple years ago. So, he helped build some enrollment ads, some open house ads for that.And they really did hit off um just not, not just on TikTok, but on all of our social media platforms um so that definitely helped. He also grew a lot in photography.We do a lot of print materials during enrollment season.So, I would just tell him like, can you go please capture some photos of students in action for these print materials? And he would go come back and yeah, he would just have everything done.
(JW) Kenny, how will you take those experiences and use them in your future?
(KV) Oh, In my future, I'll probably, I think, it will just give me a leading step of expanding my thoughts when I'm in college. Because in college, I guess it'll be like a higher education and then just knowing a little bit ahead of time will just help me expand on my thoughts.
(JW) What are you planning to study when you go to Alma?
(KV) I'll be going for business administration.
(JW) That's great. Mr. Kaatz, how does a program like Kent Career Tech Center’s Marketing + Design, and the other programs here, help prepare students for their futures and for success in the real world?
(AK) Kids that come to KCTC get the hands-on experience and when they're doing something that they enjoy they find that they can be successful in things.And I've seen it time and time again where once a student starts to find their successes here in the building, it translates back to their local (school), where they realize that they can do things and they start to find their successes. And that's the beautiful thing about what we do here.
(JW) Kenny, would you agree? And if so, what are some of the things that you feel like you'll be taking with you from your KCTC experience and your time at Kelloggsville High?
(KV) Yes, I do agree ah much with that. I think just again with my confidence and everything, just like, I always think communication is like the biggest thing, and especially in a business degree, you just got to be able to like connect with people, talk to them, and then just having that connection with someone will always, I guess, will give you that next sale.
(JW) That's part of what we teach here at Kent Career Tech Center, those “Going Pro” behaviors that really help you in your next professional adventure. Kenny what is your dream?
(KV) Well, my dream, I have two dreams. One is possibly just playing tennis, because I always love tennis. So being able to play on a huge stage of tennis is just the biggest dream. But if not that, I want to own a business. I want to be an entrepreneur. That's my biggest thing. always uh was young, and I was like, I don't want to work in an office by myself, working under someone else. I always want to work in a business. I get to make the ideas. I have other people going to me and then learning and then just having my own business, working it out, selling, it's just my dream.
(JW) It's a wonderful dream. I hope you do have an opportunity to make both of those dreams come true. Mr. Kaatzs and Edith, would you like to share with us why it's important for adults like us to ask students like Kenny what their dreams are?
(AK) For myself, by knowing what kids' aspirations are, what they want to be able to do, you start to try to tailor-make things. and you use analogies that are more along the lines of what they're into and try to relate to how the curriculum can tie into what they want to do. I have a student that was talking this morning about wanting to continue going to Central Michigan for fashion design and it's like, your Illustrator skills are going to line up just absolutely perfect with that, and if I'd known some of that earlier, then I could have used that to help benefit us, and that's the huge thing in our class.
(ER) I think it's important because you just never know how you can help somebody. Every dream is unique and like I mentioned, you just never know how you can help them in any kind of way, either with connections or networking or something that you personally know that they could relate with. It's just, you just never know.
(JW) You do never know. And Kenny, what would be your advice for a student who maybe is just starting high school on how they could really help encourage their own dreams?
(KV) I think the best way to do it is just, to just try. Try to like always be open-minded, always like try something new, because you're not going to know if you don't like it if you don't try.
(JW) That's another great piece of advice.I just want to thank all of you for joining us today for our podcasting conversation. Thanks, Kenny.
(KV) Thank you.
(JW) And thank you so much to Mr. Kaatz.
(AK) Thank you for the opportunity.
(JW) And to you, Edith.
(ER) Thank you.
(JW) And I'd like to thank everyone who's listening to our podcast today, too.If you know of a student who dreams big, we would love to share their story.You can find more episodes of the Your Dream Is Our Dream podcast and submit your ideas by going to our website, KentISD.org/Your Dream. I'm Joy Walczak. The Your Dream Is Our Dream podcast is presented by Kent ISD in partnership with WGVU.
