Career and Leadership Development Academy, Cohort One, Digital Technologies Day Blog

Throughout the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s Career and Leadership Development Academy ten month program, each of the eight middle schools are assigned a day to write about their experiences. 37 students from across all eight New Hanover County middle schools participated in the seventh industry exploration day in Cohort Two, Digital Technologies, on March 6 at nCino, Inc. In addition to learning about the careers at nCino, they had the opportunity to hear from Grover Gaming and Vantaca, two other local companies in the digital technologies space. Below is the seventh blog write up from Cohort Two of the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s Career and Leadership Academy experience.

First we learned about Zerick Applin. He won a scholarship for track, but then became a career banker. He had gone back to school in 2014 to get his bachelors degree and then moved here to wilmington about 5 years ago.He told us about the company, ncino, and how it is a cloud banking company that does software for people and banks. There are many global offices all around the world.

We then got split up into three groups. The leaders in my group told us that everyone who works there is always working together and it's not a one person thing. We walked around and saw game rooms, arcade rooms, and a Binnie and Bo’s. They have these little rooms and each of them is named based on cities, attractions, or even beaches in North Carolina. We walked into one of the arcade rooms and saw a timeline of all of the achievements and events that have happened at ncino.

In my group we learned about Brenda. She is an associate support engineer. What she does is that she sells applications to a financial institution. She went to UNC Greensboro for her choir goal, went to work in business, then got a masters degree in computer science, and then came here to work at ncino and has been there for about a month.

We also learned about Ellie, who got an internship to work at ncino while she was in college and has been there ever since. Her job is to talk to banks who use their products, take feedback and translate it. She then gets back and tells them that their feedback has been installed and worked out. Ellie also works with software engineers.

Next up we started doing lots of group activities! The first one was called the logo challenge. In this challenge everyone worked together to redesign the ncino logo. Everyone put all their ideas together and the outcome was great. The group that won was group one. With their picture being an earth with ncino written inside. This isn't a very clear photo but this is a photo of group twos logo without color.

The next challenge we did was called the price challenge! This challenge was super fun and really made us have to put our heads together to get to the end. What the challenge was, was to find something that everyone wanted to buy that was under 1000$. Group two ended up choosing Olivia Rodrigo concert tickets. After figuring out what we wanted to buy we had to come up with ideas to “raise the money” to buy the tickets. Some ideas group two came up with were dog walking, baby sitting, cleaning, and flipping items. We then came up with an average amount of money you can earn from doing these jobs per week.We came to the conclusion that it would take about five weeks to earn the money we needed for the tickets. But we also have to think about how much money will be taken out of that. Each week we actually made less and less money than what we started out making. After all the expenses and hard work we eventually made all the money we needed in seven weeks. In the end this was such an amazing and interesting way to think about money and how we spend it!

The next activity we did was about our health and well being. We learned about how meditation and health are very important. We watched two videos about his topic. One was a seven minute calming journey on the beach. The second video was showing us some stretches to calm us. This was a very calming activity and a nice change to the competitive challenges we were doing before!

In conclusion this was a great field trip and we had so much fun. We learned so much stuff that we did not know before and that we can learn in the future.