Future hires

No matter what you do, you’re always trying to sell yourself, and we wanted these kids to be able to put their best foot forward.”

Alan Hodish, Former president, E.M. Chamber of Commerce

Everyone who participates is so kind and so professional.”

Melissa Woisin, Secretary, Advisory board

Some questions students were asked:

- Tell me about yourself.

- Why did you decide to pursue this job?

- How were your grades? In which courses did you do well?

- What are your strengths? Weaknesses?

- What would you like to be doing 10 years

from now?

“So, tell me a little about yourself,” I asked Chelsea Lee, a junior at East Meadow High School.

This was only one of the questions I asked her and Angelina Calabro, also a junior, on March 18 during their virtual mock interviews.

The East Meadow Chamber of Commerce has been hosting the Millie Jones mock interview event for the past 13 years. Juniors in the Academy of Fi-nance program at East Meadow and W.T. Clarke high schools participate in the interviews, which aim to improve their skills and prepare them for college or future jobs.

Alan Hodish, a past president of the chamber, is the mastermind of the event. Hodish said he’d been told that students who had come to the chamber for jobs or internships were not very prepared for interviews.

“We wanted to give back to both Clarke and East Meadow high schools and give these kids a leg up on interviewing,” Hodish said. “It could be helpful for a summer job at a day camp, for college interviews or regular business interviews.”

The Academy of Finance is a program offered to the two high schools by the National Academy Foundation, a company that supports career academies within traditional high schools. It allows students to take a variety of business classes. The mock interviews are just one requirement that the students need to complete to get NAF-certified, said Melissa Woison, the secretary of the advisory board for the Academy of Finance at East Meadow High.

Chamber members, East Meadow Kiwanis members and this year, me, a journalist from the Herald, played the part of future employers. We were assigned a student or students to interview. Then the students — or, for this exercise, the potential employees — introduced themselves to their interviewers. Beforehand, each interviewer was given the student’s resume, a list of potential questions to ask and a rubric to grade them.

“No matter what you do, you’re always trying to sell yourself, and we wanted these kids to be able to put their best foot forward,” Hodish said. “We got some tremendous feedback on it.” He added that some students even wind up landing jobs or internships with chamber members.

Each student was told to research his or her potential future employer before the interviews to know what type of job they would be interviewing for and to dress professionally. Lee and Calabro were interviewing for a reporter position with me as their future employer.

Lee said that she was looking to get a job that would allow her to use her technological, organizational and bilingual skills in the workplace. She talked about her strengths and weaknesses and of her volunteer work, which included teaching English to a Pakistani girl.

She said that she liked writing and researching and would like to write about current events. At the end of her interview, she asked me questions. One was whether I thought that any experience on her resume made her qualified for the job.

Calabro said that she was seeking a position where she could use her creative and design skills to ensure the company’s success. She told me about her experience with design from classes she’s taken and that she excels in English class. She said that she works two jobs and that one of her strengths is time management.

Before the interviews took place Hodish said that chamber members visited some business classes virtually and talked to the students about resume building, dressing professionally and other skills they felt would help the  students to achieve success.

“We gave them a little warm-up before the interview,” Hodish said. “We wanted them to be prepared.”

Woison said that the program has grown tremendously. “It started with just my business management classes and about 35 students and probably about 20 chamber members,” she said. “This year it was about 65 students participating and 35 chamber members.”

There are two mindsets that students have when they find out that they will have to participate in this mock interview, Woison said. They think it’s either a great learning experience or they become very nervous and hesitant. But at the end of the day, she said, students come out loving it.

“I would tell them to take a deep breath and that this is all a learning experience,” she said. “I would check on those students in particular after and they say it wasn’t so bad.”

Sumaiya Chowdhury, another junior who participated in the mock interviews, said that at first, she was a little scared. “I found out my freshman year that I had to do this and in freshman year you don’t know anything,” Chowdhury said. “But in freshman year I took the class careers in finance, and we did a mock interview with our teacher and that helped me feel more prepared.” Chowdhury was interviewed by Chamber President Richie Krug Jr.

“[Krug] wound up only asking me one question from the list of possible questions and from there he based all of the questions off of what I said in the beginning,” she said. “It made me think quickly on my feet and create better sounding responses.”

It’s all about being prepared, Woison said. “Everyone who participates is so kind and so professional,” she said. “They do a great benefit for the students.”