On a Wednesday morning in San Bruno, the hallways of Skyline College filled with something you don’t always expect on a community college campus: the sound of high schoolers.
More than three hundred students from the Jefferson Union High School District (JUHSD) made their way up the hill to Skyline College on March 25 for “JUHSD Next Steps 2026,” an annual career exploration event that brings together industry professionals, educators, and teenagers beginning to think seriously about what comes after graduation, whether they feel ready or not.
They came from Jefferson, Westmoor, Terra Nova, and Oceana. They arrived in buses, in vans, in waves. And for thirty minutes at a time, they sat across from people who actually do the work they might one day want to do.
The sessions, spread across six classrooms, covered a lot of ground. An Arts and Entertainment panel featuring voices from media outlets like KCBS Radio and independent publications such as Hugg Magazine and Beach Break Entertainment focused on craft and hustle. In another room, representatives from Planned Parenthood NorCal, American Medical Response, and Skyline College’s own Emergency Medical Corps laid out what a career in healthcare actually looks like, from the clinical to the community-facing. Down the hall, electricians and engineers from JATC 467 and the San Mateo County Building Trades made the case for construction.
There were sessions on financial literacy, led by Larry Pon of Pon & Associates, a topic that can feel abstract at sixteen but rarely does by twenty-five. There were conversations about hospitality, real estate, childcare, parks and recreation, and what it means to build a career story worth telling. Kenneth Forward of the SALT Task Force ran his session, “What’s Next: Career Exploration,” all four time slots, meeting students wherever they were in their thinking.
For some students, it was their first time hearing directly from professionals in fields they had only seen online. “I always thought you lowkey just pick something and hope it works out,” said Andrew, a junior at Westmoor High School. “This made it feel like there’s actually a path.”
The format was deliberately fast. Two sessions per visit. Thirty minutes each. Enough time to hear something that sticks.
That’s really the bet the event makes, that one conversation, one person who took an unexpected path and can talk honestly about it, might land differently than a brochure or a career quiz ever could. “Students are able to see how the classroom work translates to the real world,” said Alfredo Olguin, Retention Specialist at Skyline College Dual Enrollment. The goal of Next Steps, Alfredo said, is to give students direct exposure to career pathways before they graduate.
Students rotated through in two groups, with the morning cohort clearing out around 11:00 a.m. and the afternoon group arriving just before noon. Teachers and supervisors, for their part, were kept fed, coffee and pastries in the morning, a to-go meal in the afternoon.
By 2:00 p.m., the buses had gone back down the hill. The classrooms emptied. But if the event did what it set out to do, a few students left with something more than a schedule and a free lunch: a clearer sense of what’s possible, and a reminder that their future may be closer than they think.
Article by By Carlos John Escala
Photos by Claudia Paz
