// Speakers
Twenty minutes, from your desk.
Panther CS is a student-run computer science club at O'Fallon Township High School. We're building a real website for every club in the school, and a few times a semester we ask someone who does this for a living to talk to the room. Mostly over Zoom, because "drive to O'Fallon on a Thursday" is a much bigger ask than it needs to be.
// The ask
Exactly what we're asking for.
- Twenty minutes, plus questions. Usually around forty minutes end to end.
- Over Zoom. You don't come to the building. A few local speakers do join us in person, but that's a bonus, never the expectation.
- After school, once every two or three weeks. We only need one slot, and we'll work around your calendar rather than the other way round.
- No slides required. Talking through what your week actually looks like is more use to this room than a deck.
What we handle
Scheduling, the district's outside-speaker approval — most districts require it, virtual visits included — and an audio/video dry run in the room beforehand, since sound is the usual thing that goes wrong.
The audience
Fifteen to thirty high schoolers, most of whom started the year having never written a line of code. They are building and shipping a real website while they learn, so they're closer to your work than you might expect — but assume nothing about vocabulary.
// Who
Who we're hoping to hear from.
- OTHS alumni working in tech. Someone who sat in these classrooms and now does the job lands differently than anyone else we could book.
- Working software engineers, anywhere, at any size of company.
- Working designers, writers, and photographers. If every speaker we book is a coder, the students on our design track reasonably conclude this is a coder's club and that they're decoration — and then they stop coming.
- Students and faculty at UIUC, SIUE, SLU, and anywhere else nearby.
- Parents of OTHS students who work in the field.
What makes a good talk here
Honest answers about what the job is actually like. How you got in. What you were wrong about. What a normal Tuesday contains. What you'd tell a fifteen-year-old who thinks they might want this, and what you'd tell one who's already decided they don't.
Not a speaker, but an alum?
Tell us what you're doing anyway. Knowing where OTHS graduates ended up is useful on its own, and there's no obligation attached to answering.
// Getting in touch
Say the word.
The club is being chartered for the 2026–27 school year, so a couple of these are still being set up. What's here is honest about which.
- A club address is being set up — check back shortly
- Faculty advisor
- Confirmed
- Meetings
- Weekly after school; day and room announced in September
Correspondence about speaking is handled by the student officers with the faculty advisor copied in, so you are not in a one-to-one thread with a student. Once the club address below is live, that is what it routes to.
Twenty minutes, once.
If you can spare a slot, we'd like to hear from you. If you'd rather see what the students are building first, that's here too.