Chamber’s Career Exploration Day hosts 81 students

Businessmen and women brought their young protégés along during the Saipan Chamber of Commerce’s general membership meeting yesterday. (David B. Chan)

Eighty-one students participated in the Saipan Chamber of Commerce’s Career Exploration Day yesterday. High school students from both private and public schools joined professionals from all over the island to get a glimpse of workforce life.

Phillip Lee and Woori Lee joined a T Galleria supervisor for their exploration. They attended an orientation, visited the airport to see how products from other countries are received, taken cared of, and brought to the T Galleria, Phillip Lee said.

“We walked around what’s in there, and learned how merchandising works, how the retail team works, and how the Duty Free and airport circulates products and sells it to customers, and how it’s related to tourism,” Woori Lee said.

Would she like to get into retail? Woori said she is “thinking about it,” and added she is now considering working at DFS.

Before yesterday, Nemie Baiza from Marianas High School thought that accounting was all about counting on calculators but later realized that “we all really need accounting” in our lives. Baiza now actually thinks he’d like to be an accountant. He joined Maggie Crisostomo, from Kagman High School, at Pacific Insurance Underwriters.

Crisostomo, who said she would like to be a journalist, noticed that the staff at Pacific Underwriters all seemed “really close.” She liked their “one-on-one” approach to customer service and would keep that in mind if she ever gets into customer service herself.

Justin Youm and Sky Izuka, seniors from Grace Christian Academy, spent the morning with Micronesia Brokers. Youm spent time with its general manager, and Izuka with the sales manager.

“It was a great experience to learn how the company works just by talking with different people who actually work at the company, and learning how to be a manager of a bigger company,” he said.

He said he has no intention of becoming a businessman but wants to tie marketing with his main pursuit: engineering.

“Since engineering is also a business, it is enticing customers to buy engineering products. It was really a precious experience for me to see how the business works so I can tie it with my future career,” he said.

Izuka is aiming to major in business administration. He learned about how it is to be business representative who advertises for many other companies and stores.

“It really helped me,” he said.