Reflective an Interview with School Worker

The person that I interviewed is Brittany Simpson. She works at Cameron High School in the school district of Cameron. She is the coordinator of marketing internship program in the school. I interviewed her on Friday evening. I really enjoyed working with her and I really appreciated her giving her time on Friday evening. She was very nice, and she answered all the questions very openly during the interview.

To start the personal interview, I started off with a very simple question, the name and the district of the school. I already knew the school and the school district, but I did not want to go and ask some open-end question. Followed by that I asked her how many students were in the program, she replied “This year, I have only two in the program. In the past we had a thing called school flex and the students had to do a lot during the school flex time and I had a lot of kids that dropped my marketing internship because I require some other assignments and I also have a lot of kids that they have gotten rid of school flex so I’m hoping to build it back up and then school got rid of school flex too. She wants to build it back in the next couple of years.” She was positive about building the school flex back again and I really loved how patience she was. She wants to build it over time, not in a day or two.

Since there were only two students in the class only two of them were working and they had some positions. I asked her about the positions held by the students next. She told “One student works for their parents’ business and one is kind of like a secretary at her mom’s law firm.” Both the students were working for their parents as a side job so they could make some extra money. She also added, “They are both involved in a lot of activities”. Then I asked her about the mission of Cooperative program and she went like this, “So our mission is basically just to develop leaders and kids that are very aware of what goes into marketing, I try and get the kids real world experience so they know there are ton of job opportunities in the marketing roles as they just look for them.” In one word her goal is to create children that are self-sufficient, leaders that have good work ethics. She also added, “I want children to go and find answers to thing rather than them just googling it.” I really liked the goal.

It was her fifth year at the Cameron High School. So, I asked her the three traits that make a successful coordinator, here are her exact words. “Personally you have to be super organized because the students will turn in their stuffs to you so I have a separate folder in my email because they all come electronically plus I give them due dates from very beginning of the semester all the way through December so they can work ahead if they think they are going to be busy later. So, I think organization is huge. The second thing is confidentiality. I do not know how to put the last one in one term, but it is building relationships.” She also talked about how she also received pay stubs from students, and she was getting someone else’s Social Security Number, bank account number and she said she had to be super confidential with that. She also talked about how communication was important when they had some problems.

As she mentioned one of the most important traits were organization, I got interested and asked her how she organized herself, plan and prioritize the work, “I give them each of them a binder on the first day of school, which has syllabus, requirement of the workplace they have to be at, all the assignments throughout the semester, she replied”. She also had fixed due dates for the assignments and handed out evaluation form at the end of every month, which I think is a good way to track the progress and know what is going on in the class. So, she basically planned things ahead of time.

I had a question in my head about developing a team so I asked he about the key to developing a successful team, “Well, I think part of it is being able to choose the right people, know what your goals are and be able to get the people on the board”, she replied. I think getting right people and knowing your goals are the most important things too. She also told she had a good team of counselors who would help her when she had anything related to the class or had to deal with parents.

We all have ups and downs in our career and it creates challenges, so I asked her the biggest challenge in achieving the goals, she replied from her personal experience in the case, “ I told about the school flex, that was part of it, I could not get students. I did not have any body in my marketing internship class for two years because of the program and that was a big challenge for me to be able to get students involved.” However, I feel like she was still very positive and patient, she wanted to build it over time maybe within the next 5 years and she wanted to make it as real world as possible.

It was after this question her kid started crying, but luckily for me she got back quick. Then I had this question about the time her patience was tested or any difficult situation she faced, “I have not had a time like that however I have a student this semester looking after her mom’s law firm and she has to clock in and out but it is not automated so I cannot just believe she worked and give her the credits but now from next year I need students to time in an automated clock so you can clock in and out automatically.” If the clock is not automated, you can write anything and there is hard time for the teacher to believe that. The last question that I asked her was what kept her motivated, “I really do love my job, whenever a student struggling comes back after graduation comes back to seek help. If they are my student once, they are my students forever. Getting to help them really keeps me going”.

Overall, it was a very good interview and I felt that her job was kind of hard and she was dealing with all the situations very well. She was a very kind and helpful person. I really loved to interview her, and I got the insights of the real job field. I got to learn about the things which I had never learned or heard of. In conclusion to this essay, it was a very good experience for me and I thanked her at last for giving her time.