Student
Interview
Workshops
The Student Interview Workshop program,
co-sponsored by the California Section, the Santa Clara Valley Section
and the NorCal Section of AIChE, again conducted highly successful
workshops in northern California. In 2009 the program involved
two major presentations and planning for expanding the program to
additional campuses. In 2009, we held workshops at the University
of California at Berkeley on September 12
and at the University of California at Davis on November 14. Both were
well attended, as have all of our workshops since the inception of the
program. Scheduling problems in the Spring led to postponement of a
planned
workshop at San José State University. In each
workshop, there were 25-30 students and 8-10 volunteers conducting the
training. These three locations have become regulars in our
program.
Particular plans were initiated this year to expand
the program outside the metropolitan Bay Area to farther, northern part
of the state, and also to expand the program to community
colleges. In previous years we have had presentations at San
Francisco State University, Stanford University and the University of
San Francisco. With additional venues, a two-year rotation system
is being developed. As an academic year program, several
presentations are expected in Fall and Spring terms. This year we
also added a new unit on Job Searches presented by a new member of our
team who is only a couple of years out of school. The range of
training personnel in the program continues to grow and covers 1-40
years of industrial experience.
The program has now been sustained for five years
and both the program and the group of volunteers continues to
evolve. As a volunteer-intensive program, such a refreshing of
participants is necessary, as well as maintaining a geographic
distribution of their locations.
This program was part of the California Section
Careers Program self-nomination recognized with a 2008 ChemLuminary
Award for the Outstanding Local Section Career Program Award (large and
very large sections) presented at the Washington meeting in August,
2009.
Bonnie Charpentier,
SCV Section
Lee Latimer,
California Section
A mock interview session from a past workshop