Pepperell freshmen work on their interview skills
The PHS program in its 13th year focuses on soft skills needed to get a job.
For many high schoolers, the idea of going through their first interview can be a stressful and nerve wracking experience.
However, for Pepperell High School students, they learn the skill their freshman year in Alana Ellenburg’s High School 101 class.
Pepperell is the only high school in the school system to do the mock interview lessons, according to Ellenburg. Usually, about 50 interviewers from all over the community set up in the school’s library and the students go through interviews with the volunteers as many times as possible in a 50-minute class period.
But like everything else in the past year, Ellenburg had to adjust her annual class assignment.
“It’s been hard to pull this off not face to face,” she said.
The students in her class were split into groups and set up with Google Chromebooks in a classroom with the interviewers calling on Google Meet.
The interviewers were leaders from the Lindale, Floyd County and Rome communities, such as Buzz Wachsteter, Janet Spivey, Wendy Davis, Al Hodge and Floyd County Schools Superintendent Glenn White.
During the mock interviews, the students answered typical job interview questions as the interviewers ranked and judged their performances based on their attitudes, appearance and answers.
The students interviewed for a variety of common teen jobs, such as server, cashier and host/hostess.
Ellenburg said she’s even seen students get hired for jobs and internships based on their performance in the interviews.
“So many kids come out of high school not knowing how to interview,” she said. “We need to teach them ... interviewing is a skill set.”
In her lessons, Ellenburg goes over how to prepare for job interviews, down to how a person should dress. She said she gets a lot of her information from the Georgia Department of Labor’s website.
This has been the 13th year for Ellenburg’s mock interview project and she gets a lot of positive feedback from the students and the community. The teacher even gets alumni to come back and volunteer as interviewers.
“It’s like the community is investing in the future,” she said.
As students came out of their interviews, they said they were glad their first interview was practice and felt confident going back in and doing it again. While being interviewed, Ellenburg took pictures of how they were sitting to review with them after the lessons were over.
“It’s like you (Ellenburg) said,” Freshman Sarah Gee said. “’We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.’”