It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Julia, a student at Hillcrest High School, is already in the middle of her sixth job interview for the day.
She is making her case to her potential summer employer that she is willing to learn about anything.
“I don’t want to be ignorant, so if I can learn more about any subject, I think it will benefit me in many ways,” she explains.
Julia is among the hundreds of Dallas ISD students vying for one of 370 coveted summer internships with the Mayor’s Intern Fellows Program. Students that land an internship at this April 3 job fair will work 20-40 hours per week for eight weeks this summer earning a minimum of $10 per hour.
“We want our students to persevere,” said Richard Grimsley, director of the Dallas ISD Career and Technical Education Department. “And if we place them in work experiences while they are in high school, they will see what the work world looks like and what corporate America looks like.”
For Julia, even if she doesn’t land one of the summer internships, the day has still been worthwhile.
“This gets me in the atmosphere of speaking with adults and learning how a job interview goes,” she said. “We are all very young, so we are inexperienced at this, but we are learning a lot.
