Young Students Are All Business About the Future

It didn’t take much conversation with Billy Peairs and Jonathan Hill to convince me they will help run things in this county someday. Billy, who is 14, was giving me insider tips on surfing the Internet. Jonathan, 15, was telling me about his stock portfolio.

I ran into these two budding leaders--both freshmen at Foothill High in Santa Ana--at a business issues conference in Buena Park on Friday. It was for 2,000 area high school students who had expressed an interest in what lay ahead of them once their school lives were over.

Billy and Jonathan opined that it was a productive morning away from the classroom. The message for the day was one that parents might want to heed too: It’s a tough market out there, and young people had better develop skills now to help them survive later. Some students appeared surprised when told that 40,000 people applied for a handful of firefighter jobs that had opened up.

Students attended sessions on job interviewing, starting your own business, obtaining credit, and computers. Two job recruiters gave tips good for any of us.

Kendra Miller of Fluor Daniel Inc., the Irvine-based international engineering and construction company, said she turned down one applicant who asked if Fluor Daniel was global.

“I didn’t think he knew enough about us to really want to work for us,” she said.

Julie Monfette, who recruits for Orange County government, offered what would seem a simple suggestion: Show up on time for the interview--even if it means taking a dry run the day before.

“I cannot stress enough punctuality,” she said. “If you’re late for the interview, what does that say about your work habits if we hire you?”

I was reminded of my own limited experience in hiring, when I worked for an afternoon paper in Louisville. A young recruit with impressive credentials was 90 minutes late for a 10 a.m. interview because he’d overslept. Two of us suggested this was a bad sign. We were overruled and he was hired, only to be fired later for missing deadlines.

Another tip from Miller I could relate to: “Don’t make yourself a pest, but don’t be afraid to be persistent if you get turned down the first time. Let us know you still want us.” One of our best reporters in Louisville was someone we hired because he just refused to go away after repeated job rejections from us.

I thought about those rejections as I looked at the anxious faces of the young people at the conference. They seemed too innocent to have to deal with such harsh realities of competition. But one speaker, Dineh Moharjer, told me she could identify with how wary some of those students must be feeling about life after school.

“I can remember being that age, sitting where they are, and wondering if I had any future at all,” she said.

She and two friends founded the Beverly Hills-based Hard Candy cosmetics firm, which grossed $10 million last year. Moharjer, by the way, is only 25; she was surrounded by awe-struck students who wondered how she did it.

Among her fascinated admirers were Hiral Patel, 16, and Dippti Patel, 17, (no relation), and Zahra Bawa, 17, seniors at Western High in Anaheim. I asked them what they got from the conference.

“That you don’t give up,” said Dippti, who wants to be a flight attendant with the same fervor that her friend Hiral wants to be an optometrist. “You fall down once, twice, but you get up and keep going. That’s what I’m going to do.”

I asked the three girls if they shared my observation that some of the students seemed to have no interest in the conference at all. They seemed to have showed up just for the free Carl’s Jr. lunch.

“Losers,” declared Zahra, who wants to be an accountant. “It’s like, hello, you’re seniors now. You’d better get serious about this.”

But one speaker, Rachel Winston, cautions that we shouldn’t be put off by that disinterest.

“Believe me, these kids want a future,” she said. “They just haven’t discovered yet what it is they’re in love with. It takes time for some.”

Winston runs her own educational financial aid business in Irvine. Her credentials left many of the students wide-eyed. She has five bachelor and three master’s degrees, most related to chemical engineering. She now flies to Harvard University one day every week to complete a doctorate in education policy. Winston calculates that’s she’s been taking college courses each of the past 24 years.

“What I love is school,” she said. “Find out what it is you love, then go after it.”

But will the marketplace find room for you once you do? My two future leaders from Foothill High are convinced their generation will find plenty of jobs.

Said Jonathan Hill: “This conference gave me a better idea how the world functions, and what I need to do to find my place in it. I want that challenge.”

And from Billy Peairs: “Sure, it’s going to be complex, and very competitive out there. I can hardly wait.”

*

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com