(Project) MIYB Project Two: Job Coaching

The project today will require you to help coach students in the Harbor's afterschool program, Senior Education.

Senior Ed is a program geared toward students aged 8-12 that teaches young students in elementary school about the fundamentals of the real world. As a part of this program, Senior Ed students participate in something called Microsociety, which is a pretend "work-world" that the students maintain. MicroSociety has its own currency, businesses, and workers who have work days and days off. Every student in MicroSociety is either a manager or worker in one of the businesses there, and s/he must interview for any of the positions seeked.

Today is a job fair day for the MicroSociety component of Senior Ed. This means that the students will be interviewing for the different positions that will be available to them in the hopes of landing the MicroSociety job of their dreams.

This is where you come in. The project this week is to:

(1) Work in a group to develop some coaching services that you will offer to MicroSociety students as they wait to be interviewed. The coaching services will be geared to prepare the students in some way for the interviews they will have today. The services you offer should not take more than 5-7 minutes for each student. (Some examples of services can be offering help in completing the MicroSociety job application, conducting a short a mock interview and offering feedback or pointers, or some other service that you decide upon.)

(2) Meet with the MicroSociety students as they wait for their interviews and offer your services to as many students as possible.

(3) Give each of the students you serve an evaluation slip that the student will use to rate your services. (Evaluation slips will be supplied to you.) You do not need to collect these back from the students.

(4) Create a written description of your services to be handed in by the end of the day.

Your groups will be judged based on the ratings they recieve and the completeness of the descriptions you hand in at the end of the day.

Good Luck.

Blogging Perspectives/People (Continued)

Blogs, as we have seen last week, can be used in many capacities. A person can use a blog to publish journal entries, thoughts, assignments... The possibilities are limitless. And yet, there is perhaps one thing that remains true for every blog. That is, every blog is a reflection of the blogger.

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Overview
Today's excercise will require that you (1) complete your Blogger profile, (2) answer the questions below as a post on your blog, (3) comment on each other's blogs, and (4) introduce each other in class.

Directions
Complete your Blogger Profile online. To do this, go to the "Dashboard" and follow the link to edit your profile. Then answer the questions below.

Questions

1. Is this picture on its side or upside-down? Describe what this is a picture of.
   
   
   
   
2. What do you think the artist of this collage was trying to say? Why do you think that?
   
   
   


3. What picture/drawing/work of art best represents your character? (Link to an image of it if possible, or describe it for us.)



4. What do you think is going on in the comic strip below. (Feel free to make up characters' lines.
   
   
   

(Project) MIYB: Business Plan Basics

As you have learned in the pre-workshop exercises today, writing a business plan is a big project that starts with good organization and dilligently researched information.
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Today's Project:
Today, as your MIYB Project, you will be broken into two or three groups and asked to create a basic business plan according to the criteria we went over earlier today.

Keeping in mind our "Focus Five" sections of the business plan ((1) Business Concept, (2) Future Goals/Past Milestones, (3) Customer/Market Information, (4) Competitor Information, and (5) Products and Services), create a basic business plan for Redken, a New York-based hair product company who won a 2006 Webby Award for website design in the Beauty and Cosmetics category.

Today's winning group members will recieve, individually, $30 toward their clothing bank. The deadline for submissions of business plans is today, at 6:00PM.


Good Luck.

Internet Scavenger Hunt/ Computer Literature Activity

Here is an activity to test your Internet surfing skills! Using the list below, begin to search the Internet for all the items. You must either cut and paste the items on your blogger post or type a link to the item. The person who finds the most or all the items and posts pictures of them or links to them on their blogs, will win. You will be given a time limit of 40 - 45 minutes. In addition to finding the items, you will be given a few questions to answer. Remember to do your best and good luck!

Scavenger List

1. A Black Butterfly
2. A child catching a ball
3. A man in a business suit with a red tie
4. Two dogs kissing
5. An elephant eating
6. A woman with an attitude
7. A resume
8. The business hours of the Parkchester Library in the Bronx
9. The world champion who ate the most hot dogs in 2006
10. The current Manhattan Borough President
11. The baseball team who won the world series in 1974
12. The number of schools listed in the New York City Public School system
13. A person who has the same first name as you and their importance
14. A black panther
15. An Indian tribal symbol
16. A baby crying
17. A your favorite artist/ actor/ actress or singing group
18. An apartment for rent ad
19. A credit card advertisement
20. A vacation spot

Questions

What item was the most difficult to find? Why?

What was the easiest thing to find? Why?

What item on the list best describes you? Why? (Use poetic devices.)

(Report) The Mock Interview Project

SCENE: A Boys and Girls Harbor hallway on a late August afternoon, muggy, and overcast.

Peeking through the door of room 473, passing Harbor students inquired about "the woman in the pretty suit."

Meanwhile, sitting on the opposite side of the table inside 473, three FW participants donned alter egos one after another and talked about their experiences as a Purple-Heart Marine, a preschool principal, and a former GamePro graphic designer.

Quietly in the corner, a digital camera hummed along, as if to second that this week at First Work was not just business-as-usual.

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Project Background

In July, participants at First Work began a workshop series that asked them to consider what it is that makes a good job interview candidate good and put it all down on paper—everything from fictional stories of their character in action to illustrated pictures of their imaginary person.

In the initial stages of developing their characters, participants were asked to consider such things as: What kinds of music do their characters like? What kinds of movies do they watch? What sorts of accomplishments, education, and experience have gone into making these characters the best interviewees possible?

The discussions generated by the month and a half of subsequent character development sparked interesting intrigues into the relationship between one's personal life, demographics, and job marketability. Participants questioned if/how race, personal hobbies, and even one's ability to make difficult, extemporaneous choices affect one's apparent suitability for a position, and how one can present oneself in the best possible light at an interview.

Towards Mock Interviews

The purpose of the July-August character development activities was to set up FW participants for the August Mock Interviews, in which participants would be asked to role play their characters, whose education, experience, and circumstantial were necessary for successful consideration for a position of the participant's choosing.

In this, the overarching aim of the Summer Mock Interviews was to promote and allow the students to demonstrate their understanding of the interpersonal and presentational skills necessary to convince an interviewer that one is the best candidate for a given position, and not to focus on any lack of experience or education that could impede one's chances for the position.

To help with the interviewing, a Human Resources specialist at Chase Manhattan Bank, Ms. T. Lilly, offered her expertise as a fair and impartial interviewer with whom the students were not familiar, and offered the students invaluable advice about sharpening their interviewing skills.

The Mock Interview Project took the place of a MIYB project, and participants who were either recommended by Ms. Lilly for hire or were requested for a second interview achieved passing marks.

"I thought the project today was good," said Caryl as he rounded out his first full week in the program. "It helped me get a better sense of how I interview. I haven't been on that many interviews, so it'll help me do better on [them]."

(Assignment) Identifying Career Interests

Identifying career interests is the first step on your way to getting yourself together for the future. Identification can be a difficult thing, especially if you aren't completely sure about what it is you want to do, but if you can identify and understand your job options first, you'll know exactly what it is you're getting into before it's too late to change your mind.

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The Assignment

1. Go online to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Website and click on Occupational Outlook Handbook under the Publications section.
2. Think about and type the name of a career field you would like to do in the Search the Handbook text field on the top right part of the page.
3. Choose a link that matches your career interests from the list of results. (If you don't see your preferred career in this list, modify your search to one or two words, or try to look up the profession in the A to Z listing.)
4. When you have found careers that you are interested in, print out PDF files regarding the careers.
5. Read over the following sections from the careers you chose: (A) Nature of the Work; (B) Training, Other Qualifications, and Advancement; (C) Job Outlook; and (D) Earnings.
6. Lastly answer in your blog the questions below for each of the three careers you have chosen.

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Questions

1. Before you did this exercise, did you already know all the information in the Nature of the Work section, or were there some things that surprised you? If there were some things you didn't know, what are some examples?
2. How many years of training did you expect to have to complete for the career before you read the file in the OOH? How many years of training is suggested in the OOH?
3. What is the job outlook for the career you have chosen? Is this promising or forboding?
4. How are the earnings for the career you have chosen? Will this be enough to live on your own? (Consider that a salary of about $35,000 is needed to live comfortably in any of the outside boroughs paying the market rate for rent these days.
   
   When you have finished the above questions for each of your three career options, please answer question 5.
   
5. Of the three career options you have listed above, which seems the most feasible for you personally? Why? Do you think that this career will be rewarding? How old will you be when you have completed the training necessary to qualify for the position you choose? How will you support yourself until then?

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(Workshop) Career Exploration Learning Styles and Career Options

OBJECTIVE
By the end of class today in Career Exploration, you should be able to:

1. Determine which of the four learning styles apply most to you
2. Have a sense of how your preferred learning style can help indicate your career preferences or your suitability for certain careers

THE WORKSHOP
When you begin career exploration today, listen to the descriptions of today's four focus characters (Melissa, Umberto, Irene, and Sebastian). Once you have listened to the characters' introductions, decide which character sounds most like you and which character sounds least like you.

After you have decided on your characters, familiarize yourself with who you chose.

What kind of activities would they like to do? What kinds of personality traits do you think they would have? Discuss your characters for a minute with someone else, then, when you think you have gotten a good handle on them, go through the career paths that we finished last month in workshop--but as your characters would.

(Career Path Worksheet for Today's Activity)

In this warmup, answer each of the questions on the Career Path as the characters you picked as you make your way to their "suggested careers." Jot down the information on the worksheet, which you may download above as a jpeg file.

When you gone through the career paths and have your six or seven suggested careers for each character, answer the following questions.

QUESTIONS (PART 1)

1. Which career(s) can you see your characters doing most easily? Why?
2. Which career(s) would they have the most difficulty doing? Why?
3. In general how well do you think your characters were matched? Do you think they could have been matched better using a different considerations/questions? If so, how could you match your characters to more appropriate careers?

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DEVELOPMENT

Now that you have a sense of your characters, now is the time to reveal who--or should I say what they represent.

Everyone has his or her own preferred learning styles. A preferred learning style refers to the type of activities that a certain person can learn most easily from.

Each of the characters represents a person with one of four pronounced learning styles. Melissa's learning style is known as the Mastery style. Umberto's is the Understanding style, Sebastian's is the Self-Expressive style, and Irene's is the Interpersonal style. These titles are just names; and while no learning style is more superior than another, we use elements of all learning styles for different tasks in our daily lives. We are capable of learning in all the learning styles, some, however are much more suited to us than others.

Typically, there is usually one or two of the four learning styles that dominates the way we like to learn best, and the reason that we bring this subject up today in Career Exploration is because we can use an understanding of the way we like to learn in choosing a career that we'd love to do. For example, a person who has a strong Interpersonal learning style preference should perhaps reconsider doing work with little human contact. And a person who has a dominent preference for the Mastery style may not be the best person for a counseling position.

As you do the remainder of the activity today, ask yourself the question: How does the career I plan on making for myself meet my learning-style needs?

QUESTIONS (PART 2)

1. What learning style do you think is your dominant style? (Feel free to change your answer from before.)
2. Why do you think this is your dominant learning style?
3. Are there any styles that you feel rarely speaks to your preferred style of learning? Which ones?

ACTIVITY
Once you think you have your dominant learning styles figured out, let's put your guesses to the test.

Go into the Shared folder in the \server1\FWork\Students network folder. Click on the "Learning Styles Profiler.xls" file and follow the directions. When you have finished inputting your values in the table, you should print out a copy of your learning styles profile summary by clicking on the "My Profiles" tab and going to FILE > PRINT.

QUESTIONS (PART 3)

1. How on-target was your guess? (Did the learning styles you thought would be your dominant styles end up being your dominant styles?)
2. Taking into consideration the work you did with your characters, what careers or career fields do you think you are best suited for?
   
   IF TIME PERMITS
3. Go online to the College Toolkit Website and logon as MelissaMelissa, SebstianSebast, UmbertoUmberto, or IreneIrene. (The password is the same as the default Blogger password.) Then scroll down and click on the link for "Career Interest Profiler." Were your answers correct for question 2? Were there any jobs/careers listed here that surprised you? Which ones?
4. What is the general educational/training requirements for the careers that suit your dominant learning style? (Do most of the suggested careers require much training or experience? HINT: What "Job Zones" are most of your suggested careers in?