While other students are sleeping in or spending time with friends on March 18, Director of Partnership with Business Project and sophomore Mark Solomonik and Director of American Enterprise Projects and junior William Yang will lead an event to provide opportunities for fellow students to find internships.

In partnership with Bay Area Youth Career Opportunities (BAYCO), MVFBLA will host a public job fair at Cupertino High School from 3 to 5 p.m. Solomonik and Yang will invite various businesses to set up booths so students can visit them, learn about the opportunity and consider applying for an internship.

This is the first time MVFBLA is co-hosting an event with BAYCO. After thorough research and determining that BAYCO would be ideal for providing students with good opportunities, Solomonik and Yang decided to reach out to the organization.

“We thought that they were a good organization that really benefited the community,” Solomonik said. “We also thought that we could help them, expanding beyond the job fair to help them with workshops.”

To prepare for the workshop, Solomonik and Yang contacted various businesses. They started with an email template, which they sent out in mass to companies in the area. Additionally, they visited companies in person, walking up and down De Anza Blvd. in search of potential partners.

“We created a one-page proposal as well as some flyers detailing, well, first what the event is like, what they would do, but also we talked about what interns can do for the companies including administrative work, filing documents, things like that,” Yang said. “But interns can also help with social media marketing, which is a very valuable skill since teens are very good with social media. A lot of these companies [are] run by older people who aren’t really tech savvy.”

The job fair is open to anyone who is interested, and MVFBLA members are not required to attend the event. Like some other MVFBLA members, junior Audrey Lai will not be attending the event because she has already acquired many of the necessary skills through her participation in the club over the past two years. Throughout the year, MVFBLA has hosted numerous workshops to teach its members these job-seeking techniques according to Lai.

“I would say the job fair is mostly for people who want to gain new skills for their careers,” Lai said. “A lot of our members have already been exposed to this information because we work together on business skills a lot throughout the year. I also just don’t have time for an internship in my schedule at the moment.”

In addition to this fair, MVFBLA also plans on holding specific workshops for their members after the job fair, to teach students specific business skills, including creating resumes and practicing for job interviews.

“We’re having a resume workshop where there will be a PowerPoint presentation teaching students how to improve their resume,” Yang said. “We’re also having a fluid interview workshop, so we will have business professionals come and interview students to give them a mock interview environment and also give them feedback.”

Through this event, Solomonik and Yang hope to be able to provide students with internship opportunities that will help them take on responsibilities that they are not exposed to at school.

“One thing we really want to do is provide students with the real world experiences to kind of help them prepare for future careers rather than just an academic environment where you study and take tests and things like that,” Yang said.