By Staff Writer James Mellen III
On Wednesday October 17th and 18th THe Charlton College of Business Marketing and Management department hosted a mock interview seminar in the Library grand reading room. The event was organised by professors Jacqueline Einstein and Paul Bacdayan. Between Wednesday and Thursday the over 200 students attended with their classes to develop important career skills.
The event consisted of a business professionals doing mock interviews with up to three students at a time. The professionals were community business men and women, UMASSD allum and business professors.
The event accommodated 8 classes of students over the two day run time. Students began their interview by presenting their resume, then were given a mock interview by an interviewer, after about 15 minutes the interviewers switched students, thus giving each student multiple perspective on their interviewing skills.
Students were given pointers on everything from their handshakes and body language to the way they talk about their past job experience.
The Torch asked co-organizer Associate Professor of Business Doctor Paul Bacdayan what made him start the event.
He said “Students often graduate with 30 to 40 thousand dollars in debt, and we want to make sure they focus on the job market so they have a way to pay it off”.
Doctor Bacdayan emphasized that while resources like this exist on campus at the career development center, he thought that events like this should happen during class time to incentivize students to start thinking about their careers before they graduate, Doctor Bacdayan called this “course embedded career development”. While a Sophomore class was in attendance while The Torch was reporting, the target audience for this event was Juniors and Seniors.
Doctor Bacdayan said that while the event was only for students of The Charlton School, he would like to see more colleges at UMASS D incorporate course embedded career development.
Co-coordinator Professor Jacqueline Einstein had a slightly slightly different goal, when asked by The Torch she said her goal was to “let students have exposure to people outside of the University in order to reinforce what they lean in class”. Einstein had a short term goal to go along with this learning objective, to prepare students to network more effectively at the upcoming job fair.
The Torch inquired about the similarities between these mock interviews and real job interview, Einstein said that the mock interviews were shorter and students were told ahead of time what questions might be asked.
The Torch interviewed an attendee of the event, Sophomore BS Management major Dennis Madigan. Madigan reported that before going into the event he “had had good practice interviews before, but was still nervous about the event”, after the event he had “Learned so much from these people, they shared a lot of strategies on things to say, body language and preemptive research”. The Torch asked him how he would rate the event, Maddigan replied “out of five stars I would give it twenty”.
The Torch asked him about his opinion on the effectivness of Doctor Bacdayan’s class embedded career development idea.
Maddigan said “A lot of people would not search these thing out if it weren’t in a class, teachers should start having events like these in high school.”