These two student have been working at Cookie Cart for the past two or three months. Ayana and Dejah are both 15 years old and are in high school. I interviewed these enthusiastic students as follows:
Why did you start working at Cookie Cart?
Ayana: I thought Cookie Cart would be a great job where I could meet new people. Cookie Cart is going to keep me busy but it’s more than just an after school program to me. I had a job before this but I did not get pay for it. I just volunteered at a school. Yeah, this is my first job.
Dejah: I worked during the summer with the Step-up program. Step-up ended when the school year began, so i did not have money going into the school year. Now I’m working at Cookie Cart so I have money to hangout with friends and do other things too.
How do you like it here at Cookie Cart?
Ayana: I like working at Cookie Cart. It’s helping me with my future so I don’t have to be jobless when I’m in college because they will see that I was in this amazing program. Also I am meeting new friends. I love that I get to see so many new faces.
Dejah: I love making cookies at home. Working at Cookie Cart helps me do what I like to do.
The classes we take here at Cookie Cart will help us to get jobs outside of here. They allow us to learn and they help make us better people. One of the classes is through the National Career Readiness Certification which is helping us get the certification and preparation for the ACT, so we are getting help with school work too.
What’s good about Cookie Cart?
Ayana: The classroom time! There is no other program with classroom time that is like Cookie Cart. They teach you so you can have skills when you move on that are not just for your job but for life. Cookie Cart also knows that you are in school so they work around what you do at school.
Dejah: Cookie Cart is fun. I love all the classes. When I apply to other jobs I won’t have to take customer service, 360 degrees and NCRC courses. Since I worked here, other jobs will quickly look at me. I heard from my friend that she put down on an application that she worked at Cookie Cart and the people hired her on the spot.
Ayana: I love the responsibilities that I now have. Cookie Cart is really teaching me to keep up with everything that I need to do.
What are some of the thing that you don’t like?
Both: Some of the younger teens don’t know how to stop. They don’t know how to separate school and work. At school you can get away with a lot but at work its a different setting. So they don’t know how to stop playing around. Also now that Cookie Cart has new students working we don’t get as many hours.
As we ended the interview both Ayana and Dejah talked about other future jobs that they wanted to get–but all the jobs were fast food jobs. I told them to dream and look bigger than what they were thinking. They should always have big dreams, also work hard for those dreams and never let anything get in the way.