On Thursday September 23, Junior/Senior communications students at Frank H. Peterson Academies went on a very eventful and fun field trip to Dalton Agency.

Dalton Agency is a creative agency that offers four different content areas including art direction/graphic design, web/interactive, video/editing and content creation, they have different locations in Jacksonville, Atlanta and Nashville.

The Dalton Agency is allowing students who went on the field trip to shadow them for a day whenever the employees are available. The students must know which content area they want to shadow in and have reliable transportation. They will miss a school day, but this will be counted as a school activity.

Ms. Anastasia Daniels, a Communications teacher at Frank H. Peterson, was the coordinator for this field trip. Anastasia Daniels says she wanted to have this field trip “Because y’all don’t have any real-world experience in this academy and I wanted you guys to get opportunities and experience this academy real world because y’all will probably not have the chance to later.” She wants the students to gain the knowledge to see that what they learn in their communications classes they can also do in real life. Having her first field trip at Frank H. she says, “It feels revolutionary, I feel like it will make other people design field trips since I am doing this one for this academy.”

All the students going on this trip were looking forward to it. When asked what made them go on this field trip, Junior Shamya Smith says she wanted to go on this field trip “For the experience and to see what it’s actually like working at an agency that is in the same category as our academy.” Junior Alvis Rivera said he wanted to go on this field “mainly to see how an agency works.” I wanted to go on this field trip to see if they were offering anything for the career field I wanted to do in the future.

Students had to prepare five questions to ask the employees at Dalton Agency. Ms. Daniels stated that if she was a student one of her questions would be “What track do I have to be on in life to get a job here?” I myself got to go on this field trip and ask some students what one of their questions was, Junior Shamya Smith said one question she would ask was “What companies do you make advertisement for?” Caleb Lawrence, an employee at Dalton Agency says, “We are open to anyone and anything, we have no specific clients, but we do have regulars.” Junior Alvis Rivera said one of his questions was, “How do they get clients?” Dalton Agency usually gets clients through other clients or through advertising.

Pat Mckinney, who is the Chief Creator Officer of Dalton Agency, was the person who was able to make this trip happen for these students. VP, Creative Director Caleb Lawrence was our tour guide and the one who explained to us what they do at the agency.

Towards the end of the tour, they took everyone to a separate room and gave students donuts and employees, Caleb Lawrence, Pat Donnell and two other employees went over a PowerPoint of what each of them do at the agency and how they sometimes work together because of the different content areas they work in.

After the field trip students got to go eat at Happy Grilled Cheese. Junior Shamya Smith rated the field trip a 7/10 and said, “I think they can improve and make it more interactive because all they did was talk to us.” Junior Au-Janiyah Moore said, “It would’ve been more fun if they did something interactive.” Student Alvis Rivera said, “I think it was pretty fun and it was a unique experience.”