Each Friday the “This Week @ Parker” email is sent to the whole Parker community with highlights from the previous weeks. It features students, faculty, teams, but not often the highest ranking official in our state. On February 6, Governor and former Parker parent JB Pritzker’s face appeared in the first slot of the email. His face was there to share about his event with the Secrets of Success club the previous Monday.

Secrets of Success is run by juniors Skyelar Harris and Ellie Alden. They invite accomplished professionals to a Zoom meeting to discuss their careers and give advice to students. Over the past three years, they have had nine meetings.

Their faculty advisor is Upper School Dean of Students Joe Bruno. Though Harris and Alden do much of the planning and coordinating with speakers, Bruno has been a resource for the leaders and notably assisted in reaching faculty as possible attendees.

Bruno sees the club as a great opportunity to hear about peoples’ paths to success. “I think we all define and see success in different ways,” he said. Bruno believes the value of the club is “seeing yourself in somebody else and saying ‘oh, their journey was not always great.’”

Junior Davu Hemphill-Smith has attended a handful of Secrets of Success meetings since they began during his freshman year. “It was interesting to see them act just like normal people,” he said about the speakers. “You can ask any question and they’re completely comfortable with that.”

Harris and her brother Ari Harris ‘22 created the club in October of 2020 in the midst of online learning. The two wanted to be involved in extracurriculars but weren’t attracted to existing student leadership opportunities such as Student Government, so they decided to create their own student organization.

The first guest of Secrets of Success was Richard Weitz, a Hollywood producer and family friend of the Harrises. “We thought it’d be cool to use the resources that we have outside of school to help empower people inside the school,” Skyelar Harris said. 

The club took an informal hiatus while Skyelar Harris studied abroad for a semester in England, and she restarted the club at the beginning of the 22-23 school year with fellow junior Alden. Harris described their approach towards promoting the club this year as “public and aggressive,” citing their social media presence and exciting booth at the Committee Fest.

Alden and Harris spent this past summer preparing for the club and developing a list of possible speakers with a focus on trying to reach new industries. In the process of finding speakers, they often go through the brands that they like and send emails out to founders or executives.

Many of their speakers have come through family connections, including Richard Weitz and others of the most successful guests. Alden and Harris still reach out to and coordinate with these guests, but “it does help that it is a family connection,” Harris said. She thought that having “big names” come to the club has made it easier to get other professionals who are not found through family connections.

Before each event, Alden and Harris FaceTime to generate a list of questions. They try to understand the different angles of the person’s work and then balance a variety of topics that the speaker might be knowledgeable about from finance to college admissions to personal experiences. They also sometimes reach out to friends for more questions.

“I am actually quite impressed by their level of detail, especially in the way that they ask questions,” Bruno said about Alden and Harris. “I think there’s a reason why I’ve had a little role in the club: because they are so on top of it and organized.”

Alden and Harris always spend time in their events discussing the trajectories of their speakers to their successes. The club’s goal according to the first Instagram post from @fwpsecretsofsuccess is to give the Parker community the opportunity to “hear the stories of successful people who started from the bottom and climbed to the top.”

When they spoke to Weitz in 2020, he shared his story of paying his dues in the mail room and working his way up to being a Hollywood executive. They also had basketball executive Josh Bartlestein who talked about not getting playing time at the University of Michigan and still finding his way to a successful career in basketball.

Alden said that Bartletstein had a successful father but that they were interested to hear how one can “overcome that and create your own name.”

Secrets of Success club has not had any female speakers except for Weitz’s daughter who accompanied him to his event. “I’d love to see the club include more women,” junior Naomi Gross said. “I think that when we’re talking about success it’s important that everyone sees some representation of themselves in a successful place.”

Junior Josh Ijiwola believes that most Secrets of Success speakers do not necessarily come from less advantaged backgrounds and that their advice is not “beneficial” to students with other socioeconomic circumstances. “It’s beneficial for the people that have access to these types of things,” he said, “but for people that grow up low-income or just don’t have as many opportunities, it’s just not realistic for them to encounter such opportunities.”

Alden and Harris hope to have a female speaker soon to get a new perspective and story. Alden also believes that having women come to the club could be beneficial for attendance given the progressive values of the Parker community. “We don’t have that many people coming sometimes,” she said.

The event with Pritzker earlier this month drew one of their bigger crowds according to Harris, attracting about ten adults and four students. They have also had some events, for example their conversation with Peiman Raf, founder of fashion lifestyle brand Madhappy, which were attended by the heads and one other student.

Harris sees attendance as important so that the speakers feel “appreciated and like people are coming to hear them talk and they’re not wasting their time talking to this random school.” They record the events and publicize them in all school emails to widen their reach.

“We definitely get upset about it,” Harris said. “I know that if it was not my club, I would probably still come.”

Bruno believes that one challenge that factors into low attendance for Secrets of Success is the timing of events. Most Secrets of Success meetings occur in the early evening or late afternoon when students are often at activities or commuting. Some students also reported that they don’t always see communications about the club, so they don’t know when events are happening.

Junior Cate O’Connor went to one Secrets of Success club meeting as a freshman when the club was beginning. She observed that the event had many non-Parker affiliated adults and few students in attendance. “As someone who was attending the meeting, I wasn’t really an important part of the club,” O’Connor said. 

She added that this is part of a bigger trend in Upper School student organizations. “Secrets of Success is not alone in the smattering of clubs that are run by a couple heads and seem to be working with only the two heads and not really doing a lot to engage students,” O’Connor said.

Harris said that she hopes her younger brother, eighth grader Brady Harris, will eventually take over the club with a friend after she and Alden graduate. “I definitely hope the club continues,” Harris said. “It’s just a great experience and opportunity for people to see people in a career path that they could possibly want to go into.”