Aaaaand I skipped over day 4.  Apprently I’m really bad at remembering to blog.

The past couple days have been full of interesting discussion and neverending meetings (jk).  

Yesterday was the first day of business session, where, as you can guess, we conduct our seriouz bizness.  Between sessions, we had a youth luncheon, and it was great to see so many youth (aka future Young Professionals)
 present.  Because I always skipped convention in the past, I was surprised to see so many youth around me (not that I’m complaining).  
In more exciting news, we had a young professionals workshop today.  It was pretty casual, presented by a State Farm agent (though it was not a State Farm event).  His name is Vance Yoshikawa, and he is the highest ranking Japanese American officer within State Farm.  He had some great tips for the group about networking, career mapping,

and a several other important issues that I’m sure we’re all too familiar with.  Although the workshop wasn’t very structured or formal (that’s not a bad thing), it was really great to see the JACL do something like this for a group of people that is often lost in the JACL mix.  

That is not Vance Yoshikawa in the picture above.  It’s JACL National Director Floyd Mori.  I would have posted a pic of Vance speaking, but I failed you and did not get a picture.  So instead you get Floyd talking about young professionals/introducing Vance.
I also had the pleasure of meeting Secretary Norman Mineta.  I’m not sure if any of you have had the honor of doing the same, but let me tell you, he is one of the nicest people I have ever met.  I lucked into catching him while all the other convention-goers were in a luncheon (I left to get some ibuprofen, I wasn’t playing hooky), so I was able to have a chat with him.  We talked a little about how great it is to see so many youth involved and so many young people at this years convention.  If any of you are ever at an event where Secretary Mineta is present, I highly encourage you to go up and talk to him.

Tomorrow = elections, the National Youth/Student Council’s North Korean Human Rights resolution discussion/voting, and some other important things that I am too tired to remember.  
There are more pictures on our flickr account, check out the slideshow on the right side of the page, or click here.
Peace.

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