Every year, more than 100 students graduate, beginning a new chapter of their lives: college. Students go to schools all over the country, from Orlando to Boston to Los Angeles, to study dozens of different subjects. Each student finds his or her niche before leaving their high school. Even after graduating, students look to their high school for assistance and guidance. No longer do they need help editing a paper or studying for a test. They need help finding jobs.

On Dec. 18, Trinity held its first Young Alumni Internship Seminar to help young alumni find internships or jobs during and after college.

In the past, the school has sponsored an Alumni Holiday Party. The holiday party was helpful to young alumni in finding internships and jobs, but Ashley Johnston wanted to do something different, a seminar.

“When coming up with this program, I did not have an event like this to model; I could not find any other schools like Trinity Prep that offered something like this,” Johnston said.

Because of this, Johnston spoke to Jennifer Owen last August to brainstorm ideas. The shared ideas of a potential keynote speaker topics and idea formats.

42 students, graduating high school in years ranging from 2011 to 2014, attended the seminar to hear the speakers give advice for their lives after college.

The seminar began with the presentation of YouTube sensation Kid President and his video Pep Talk.

His motto “What will you do to make the world awesome?” was the underlying message of the seminar. The audience was filled with alumna who want to succeed. With the help of the speakers, success is within reach.

All of the speakers of the seminar worked hard to get where they are. They did not achieve success by hoping it would come to them. Instead, they persevered in order to reach their goal.

The seminar began with keynote speaker Tom Pisello, CEO and Founder of Alinean.

Alinean is a company develops value marketing and selling tools and improves the ability to communicate and financially justify your value. It deals with sales and marketing software and consulting services designed to evolve normal product-centric pitches into more value-focused tools.

Pisello’s presentation focused on the social media aspect of his company.

He admits that he is speaking to a group of people who grew up with social media at their disposal. He is familiar with the business aspect of social media, using it to hire workers for jobs.

He began his presentation with a story. For Christmas in 1978, his parents gave him an Apple II; one of the most high-tech computers of the time.

“It was a device that didn’t have much power,” Pisello said. “[It used floppy disks instead] of a hard drive or a flash drive, unlike the Macs today.”

The start of his technology career was figuring out how to program his gift, as it had no programs preinstalled. This was the start of the personal computer revolution.

“Even though PCs and Bill Gates took over back then, it really was pioneering,” Pisello said.

Pisello explains that he is an active Facebook user, but mostly just from the business perspective. He tells the audience that there are 1.2 billion Facebook users worldwide and 2.5 pieces of content posted each day.

“I’ve got to admit, most of it is junk,” Pisello said. “There are a lot of inspirational things that people post and video and other things that people share, but it is [more than] 500 terabytes a day.”

From a business standpoint, Facebook is used by consumer brands to connect with the audience. Businesses share pictures, videos, promotions, or anything to get the consumer’s attention.

Pisello says that he uses Facebook to promote Alinean. He writes a lot of thought leadership pieces that gets people to think about ways to sell and market differently.

“Lots of businesses do this for advertisement, outreach and special promotions,” Pisello said. “The way I want you to think about it is content sharing because content is the fuel of the social media world.”

Zach Tippit, Class of 2011, was one of the alumni in attendance.

“As a college student, getting the opportunity to come back to TPS in a professional capacity was both enthralling and nostalgic,” Tippit said. “While the event served as a networking opportunity for us recent Trinity grads, it also provided an opportunity to reconnect with old friends– both student and teacher alike. Tom Pisello was an interesting addition as a keynote due to his advice on utilizing social media while networking with industry giants present at the event was something that not even my university could provide.”

The other speakers were Whit Watson, Golf Channel reporter; Allison May, NASA intern; Rajeswari Cabey Sr., Human Resource Specialist at Sanford-Burnham Institute; Dawn Butler, VP HR Corporate for BeautiControl and US Compliance, Robert Gordon, President and CEO of FreshPoint and Craig Patton, VP and Recruiting Manager for Wells Fargo.

Each speaker recognized that interns don’t necessarily need business experience to work at their companies. Companies look for candidates that partake in school clubs, sports, community service and have a history of part-time jobs.

To quote Kid President, “The world needs you to stop being boring. Boring is easy. Everybody can be boring. What will you do to make the world awesome?”