Speaker: Justin Ostry, Teacher, MCPS
Introduce yourself and tell us who you are, where you are (city /county and state), and position at your school.
Justin Ostry: Hi, my name is Justin Ostry. I am in MCPS Montgomery County Public Schools, and I was previously the Internship Coordinator at Northwest High School.
Tell us about your experience woring with E Industries and what did you think about the projects provided to the students as interns.
Justin Ostry: I had several students working at E Industries over the past several years. And during COVID it was amazing because students could still be working at E Industries, a lot of places did not jump on the hybrid or virtual tele work internship ability. So E Industries was able to do that right from the get go. And it's grown where we started with like one or two students, we now have we had several coming from Northwest, the work that the students were doing I think was high quality work. Not only were they doing coding and contacting businesses and set up meetings and sending out professional emails, but they were working also as a team. And so there was this team focus that approach they were doing, they were meeting monthly, they're also meeting in person and then they're also meeting virtually weekly. And so you had this group dynamic, but also you had your individual work that was assigned to you. And I also think that they did a good job of scaffolding so that you knew what you had to do, you were trained and you're giving the tasks to get done and due dates and everything else like that. So unlike some internships where maybe you might be doing administrative tasks or photocopying every once in a while. E Industries, you were doing legit business work, work that employees would be doing.
Would you recommend other schools to collaborate with E Industries to provide internships to their students and if so, why?
Justin Ostry: I would highly recommend that other schools would work with E Industries. So I'm no longer in the role of Internship Coordinator Northwest, but if I was, I would probably say no because I would want to have all the positions at Northwest High School or take as many as my Northwest High school students as possible and then take the other students. But since I am no longer in that role, yes, I think all schools should reach out to E Industries. I don't see a negative. the only negative is if the student can't work independently, but that kind of defeats the whole internship program. That's the purpose, right? The kids are supposed to get out there and get hands on experience. So I definitely think in the hybrid approach, I do see that's the way businesses are going or at least a lot of businesses and so having the students get used to that I think is necessary. E Industries does a great job on connecting training to your work to real world application, so they can see this whole process of what do I need to do, how do I do it? Why am I doing this? And then the end result of that. And I think they do a really good job on that. So I do, I think schools would benefit and I can see this program through E Industries is actually growing.
