Erie Insurance Field Trip 2025

On Tuesday, April 29th, the Computer Programming class took their second field trip to Erie Insurance. This year, the field trip was organized by Jaslyne Walter, and I was very excited to be participating again! I’d love to work for Erie Insurance in the future. Our trip was chaperoned by Mr. Hart, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Scalise.

The trip started with our class getting dropped off at the Firehouse Event Center where we were greeted by Jaslyne and a couple tour guides. They gave us a run down of the agenda for the day and broke us into two tour groups.

The tour began at around 9:15, when my group first visited the newly built Thomas Hagan building. We saw their state of the art auto body lab as well as a massive facility they use to train their field workers. I’m not sure of the actual name of these areas, but I do remember how impressive they were. We weren’t allowed to take photos in those areas so we don’t leak trade secrets. We also visited other parts of the building such as the cafeteria, the mail room, the indoor employee gym, the office sector, and much more. From the tour, I learned all about the many positions and benefits Erie Insurance offers, their facilities, and their family-like culture. Overall it seemed like a very enjoyable place to work.

For the second part of the tour which took place 10:00-12:00, we had six guest speakers. They had IT positions in the company such as Cloud Engineer, Information Security Specialist, Cloud Platform Engineer, System Admin, IT Business Support Specialist, and more. Each spoke about a wide range of topics and gave tips to help us secure a future career in IT.

Here’s a list of tips from the speakers!

Upload and document your projects on Github. This is important to employers! It proves you have experience. Three of the speakers emphasized this.
Entry Level Certificates
- Security+
- Net+
- Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Cisco Certified Network Associate (CNNA)
- Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP)
- Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
Attend BSides Conferences. You can network and learn new things!
Be confident but humble.
Be comfortable being uncomfortable.
Admit when you’re wrong or don’t know.
Be able to communicate your thought process in simple terms. Effective communication is very important.
Find your best learning strategy. Know how you learn best.

Something I noticed among the speakers was that it was common for them to have started in entry-level positions such as those in the mail room or call center, which both surprised and reassured me that there is plenty room for growth in the company. After the presentation we were all treated to lunch, which was very delicious (I had a massive plate of rigatoni).

The last thing we did on the trip was a hands on activity where we simulated a requirements gathering session with our tablemates. One student was the stakeholder, and all the others were facilitators. The goal of the facilitators was to gather all of the requirements of the project that was assigned to the stakeholder. At the end, we had to present our results and explain the information the facilitators had gathered. My team did pretty well gathering the requirements from me (I was the stakeholder) and our presentation went fine. I think it was a really cool idea for a hands-on activity.

Overall, the trip was an amazing experience! I think it was incredibly valuable for myself as well as everyone in my class. I would like to thank Jaslyne Walter for organizing the trip, the docents who helped with the tour, as well as Erie Insurance itself. I very much appreciate everything they did to set up this tour for our class.