Career Day for juniors was an inspiring opportunity to listen to advice and speeches from some of the most successful alumni from our beloved school.
Cathedral Catholic invited past students from all different career fields, spanning engineering, to sports broadcasting, to real estate. Students were privy to some of the inside workings of different industries and gained true insight into the realities of joining the workforce after college.
The day started in the gym for a talk with keynote speaker Brooke Rinehart Mandril ’96, who spent 22 years in the Air Force and now serves as the Director of Navigation Systems at Lockheed Martin Space. She is a wife, mother, and absolute boss.
Reflecting on her journey through the military and through multiple positions of leadership, her main piece of advice for juniors was to just “try and find balance.” Whether it’s being a student-athlete or being a working mom, both are overwhelming roles. She stressed finding a way to balance and honor your various roles and duties. Her speech was packed with many different words of advice which the class of 2026 hopes to bring into their futures.
Afterwards, students had the privilege of going to 3 different sessions to ensure a variety of choices for everyone.
The first session I attended was for the communications, journalism, sports broadcasting, and photography session. While the alumni speakers had many interesting stories, a notable one was from Mia Galuppo ’11, talking about her time as a journalist for a magazine. She shared that she lives in L.A. and works for The Hollywood Reporter.
Galuppo stated that working with celebrities can be tough, but some experiences are really cool and fun! She was set to interview an actor from the new Star Wars movie that had just come out, and she had her list of questions ready to ask.
Her boss then told her that they needed her to interview Harrison Ford. Ford is an extremely well-accomplished actor so being able to interview him was an honor. Unfortunately, she had no questions prepared for him.
Galuppo had to improvise and face arguably one of the most famous actors of the generation. At the end, she shared some words of advice that “even if this doesn’t go well, there’s always another one.”
There’s always another interview, another test, another article, another game. There’s always going to be another event where you can break your own record and grow as a human.
The second session I attended was about business, marketing, accounting, sales, and real estate. From these speakers, junior Annie Verkoczy ‘26 said she learned that “making connections is how you get farther.”
One speaker at this session was quite young and had just graduated college. Scotty Prunty ’20 was a salesman and had coached at Cathedral; he knew some of the students in my group which created an engaging dynamic. His piece of advice was to “persist and try to do the next right thing.”
He held dreams of being a coach for basketball. He soon realized that he wanted stability so the lifestyle he wanted wouldn’t be supported by that career. With coaching comes traveling, and Prunty shared that he dreamed of raising a family and being very involved with them. Coaching would’ve intervened with that.
And so the next right thing he found was a career in sales. It had a decent profit, he had the work ethic for it, and he found he was good at it. His story is inspirational in that the future he wanted changed and he wasn’t defeated by this but found a way to make it reality.
The third and last session that I attended was for education and religion where I heard about everything from fighter pilots to the priesthood.
One speaker at this session was Viviana Morales ’21, who works at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Poway. She shared that she was still in college while also working as a youth minister at the church. Her story was interesting because she spoke about how she wasn’t a part of the faith until high school and even then she wasn’t really involved until she became the youth minister.
A priest at Cathedral helped her to find her way. Morales said that she loves her job. In fact, a few students in that session have attended the youth ministry she runs. She was energetic, bright, and said that “we’re gonna make the difference as a team.”
Overall, Career Day was a fun and educational opportunity. Even if you’re not a junior, these pieces of advice are valuable and these alumni’s stories are applicable to our lives. We need to learn to quickly adjust, to keep moving forward, make connections, and work as a team. Having Cathedral Catholic as an alumni base sure won’t make these efforts all that hard.
