Getting a head start on career experience

Every year seniors at Hewlett High School have an opportunity to leave their classrooms behind and spend time working in the field they may pursue after college. The idea is to allow students an opportunity to test the waters before deciding a major.

Adam Jaffe, who will be headed south to the University of Florida this fall, got to experience the inside of an air traffic control tower. Jaffe interned with the Federal Aviation Administration and spent time at both MacArthur and JFK airports.

“I went into the FAA thinking it was more about the designs of the airplanes,” he said. “But it really doesn’t have to do with airplanes themselves, it has to do more with the safety of the landing systems and take off systems and total flight durations.”

After speaking with several FAA engineers, Jaffe decided that yes, he wants to be an engineer, but he isn’t certain about where he’ll want to apply the skills he learns. “The FAA is definitely a possibility because I want to do something that ensures the safety of people. Rather than make myself happy I’d rather make the general population safer.”

James Silberger honed his skills as a salesman and businessman with a local company, Comfurt Collar. The firm considers its inflatable collars a more comfortable alternative to the cones worn by cats and dogs after surgery.

One of Silberger’s teachers reached out to the company for him, but he did have his own personal connection to their mission. “I actually have a dog that was paralyzed in her back legs so she needed surgery,” he said. “She had a stroke and so she was in a cone all the time.”

At Comfurt Collar, he said that his duties included running the company’s social media and making sales calls and pitches to veterinarians. Silberger will major in business at James Madison University.

While he called it a great experience he did say that in the future he thinks that he would prefer working for a larger company. “Making the calls and everyone hanging up on me, and going to all these vets looking for connections and stuff, it’s just not really what I want to do,” he said.

Two more students had a chance to sample their chosen occupation without leaving the district. Samantha Stern and Mychael Schnell helped resurrect The Boulevard, Woodmere Middle School’s newspaper, which had been dormant for more than 10 years.

Both Stern and Schnell are editors of the award-winning high school paper the Spectrum. “It was a good opportunity to teach the younger kids about what we do at the high school,” said Stern, who wrote the Hewlett Happenings column for the Herald this year. “It’s also really interesting to see what they put together because it’s very different from our newspaper.”

Schnell enjoyed helping the younger students build a paper of their own. “It’s nice to see them kind of work through the entire process and see the whole entire paper go from beginning to end,” she said. “They’re proud of then showing other people their paper.”

Both Stern and Schnell said they will study journalism at Cornell and George Washington universities, respectively.