OCEAN CITY — Annemarie Conestabile says she’s always thinking about summer time in Ocean City, even when she’s in China in the dead of winter.
Conestabile is the program director for the J-1 visa program at United Work and Travel in Ocean City and she and her team have already been taking their annual treks to all corners of the globe to interview, vet and hire the approximate 4,000 students who will be working in the resort in 2016.
“While many of the businesses that we find students for are closed, we are really busy this time of year travelling and meeting the students who want to come to Ocean City face to face,” she said.
Conestabile says United Work and Travel is one of the few companies that still go to different countries to meet students and conduct interviews. She says most companies have been trending toward the more cost effective but much less personable online options of communication like Skype.
“There is nothing quite like meeting the students in their environment and in their world,” said Conestabile.
She just returned from a trip to China and has plans to embark to the Dominican Republic and Eastern Europe in the next few months, while one of her team members just flew to Thailand earlier this week to meet with and hire prospective J-1 students.
The J-1 Visa Exchange Visitor Program, as it’s officially called by the Department of State, which also oversees the program, is focused on providing qualified students from other countries the chance to have a valuable cultural experience while participating in work and study-based exchange visitor programs.
The has been a long standing debate about whether or not the program is a valuable cultural experience for students and an indirect way in improving diplomacy, or just a way for American employers to get cheap labor.
Conestabile says United Work and Travel is so committed to ensuring that the foreign students have a positive experience that they take things one step further and actually invite some of the local employers to go along to recruit the students in other countries.
Conestabile says it has a huge impact on both the students and the employers almost every year.
“We want the employers to be able to handpick the students that they want to work for them this summer, but I think the sensitivity component becomes an even bigger part once the employers see where and how these students live,” said Conestabile.
Josh Cannon is the inventory manager at Sunset Grille and oversees many of the foreign students who work there. At 23, he’s making his first big leap across the ocean and will be hiring students at several stops in Eastern Europe. He will be just one of more than a handful of local employers travelling overseas with United Work and Travel.
“It’s not just about hiring people,” said Cannon. “I want to understand who they are, where they come from, what the education system is like and learn about their culture.”
Conestabile says the trips often help the students make a deeper connection with their employers and it helps to ease the culture shock that is inevitable when they come to America.
“We all get culture shock if we go far away from home, and I think the employers understand how some of these kids feel as being the fish out of water when they feel it for themselves. It helps to close that cultural divide,” she said.
Still, Conestabile believes that taking some of the larger J-1 student employers overseas for a recruitment trip also shows how stringent and thorough the vetting process is.
“These students all have a 3.5 GPA or above,” said Conestabile. “Rhey are all bright and hardworking and they save an awful lot of money just to get here. Employers get to see all that goes into bringing these kids to this country for the program, and I think it ends up being a really positive experience for everyone.”