DENVILLE – Mary Beth Hall was in many ways the perfect keynote speaker to kick off the annual Career Day at Morris Catholic High School.
As Verizon’s director of global IoT — short for “Internet of things” — the Class of 1983 alumna explained to the student body assembled in the gymnasium that whatever field they may choose as a career, communication-technology products and services such as those developing at Verizon will be a part of their daily lives.
“Today, technology is no longer about having a career in computer science,” Hall said. “Technology has opened the door so that whatever you like, fashion design, cooking, theater, business management, there’s going to be a technology component associated with it. Think about smart phones, you’re carrying it with you every minute of the day. The next couple of years, you will no longer carry (the technology), you’ll wear it.”
Hall mentioned several such devices already on the market such as Fitbit, GPS units and Apple Watches, which some of the students said they were using. Hall then upped the stakes with talk of smart shoes, or smart refrigerators that could sense when a household was low on milk and order it to be resupplied.
“You’re sitting in a great spot, because you grew up with this technology,” she said. “This is a natural thing for you to have on all the time, and you’re going to think up the next big app, whether that’s Uber or Facebook or Snapchat.”
She also explained the concept of IoT, which studies the incorporation of Internet and communication technology into physical devices from appliances, cars and buildings.
“The last 10 years have been about connecting people, and we’re doing a great job there,” Hall said. “The next five years will be about connecting things.”
The “Internet” and “things” components are easy enough to identify, but Hall explained that the most important aspect of IoT in terms of future careers is the “of” in the middle.
“It’s really about the ‘of,’ ” Hall said. “It’s the communication, the gap between those two things, the Internet and the object, and how they communicate without human intervention.”
Other Career Day presenters, mostly alumni of the school, offered overviews of their wide-ranging professions to students who signed up for their career preferences in advance and were scheduled into one of three class periods. The careers represented ranged from law-enforcement (including Denville Police Chief Christopher Wagner and agents from the FBI and ICE) to fashion design, financial planning, journalism, nursing, veterinary science and even neuroscience.
“We at Morris Catholic think that our annual Career Day gives our students an important exposure to an important part of life,” said school President Robert Stickles. “We spend 40 to 50 years in the workplace, and all the experts say that picking a good career that suits us is a critical part of promoting a happy and fulfilling life. So we take Career Day very seriously. We use it to show our kids the incredible variety of professions that are out there, both to help them think about their own particular careers and to encourage their appreciation of what others do.”
“I really enjoy coming back here,” said Wagner, an alumnus and repeat presenter. “I think whatever career you’re looking at, you have to get down and dirty into the minute details to find out. What we do is not what you see on television. But what we do, I love. I think it’s the best job in the world, and so if I can convince a great candidate that this is the job they should pursue, then it’s good for all of us, whatever our profession is.”
Wagner said he identified two good candidates, “a young girl and a young man, both of whom I think would make great police officers.”
“We think that today was a big success,” Stickles said. “We were especially happy to have so many of our own alumni participate, which supports what we tell our kids, that their relationship with Morris Catholic can, and should, extend well beyond their four years on campus.”
Staff Writer William Westhoven: 973-917-9242; [email protected].
