Year in, year out, the students of Bonita Vista High (BVH) watch as the Associated Student Body (ASB) application announcements come and go. On April 9, BVH’s ASB announced applications for ASB positions for the 2021-2022 school year, which saw 177 students applying. To students who desire to be a part of the ASB, getting a better understanding of how the application process works is helpful, especially during this ongoing school year, where the pandemic has forced the process to go hybrid– conducting both online and in-person interviews and activities. 

“Seeing how the ASB has adjusted to [the pandemic], I thought we did pretty well considering the circumstances,” 2020-2021 ASB Spirit Commissioner, 2021-2022 ASB President and junior Jasmine Huerta said. 

Huerta has expressed her perspectives on the application process as an applicant and an already regressed member of the ASB. ASB’s application process can be straightforward as expressed by current ASB Public Relations commissioner, newly elected Secretary for the ASB and junior  Samantha Bianes, who herself applied during the pandemic. However, Bianes mentioned that the process may be prolonged depending on if any debate arises surrounding a potential candidate. 

“For me, the application process stopped at the third interview but sometimes, it’ll go to fourth [interviews], and sometimes they won’t. It really depends,” Bianes said.

The application process regularly involves three separate interviews with two assigned activities injected between each interview date. The panel interview consists of BVH’s Assistant Principal of Student Activities Christopher Alvarez and ASB officers for the 2021-2022 school year.  However, this year, the application process was modified in an effort to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the pandemic, the ASB application process is administered as a variety of individual online tasks, curated by the ASB themselves, all with a limited number of actual students who did any in-person activities or interviews.

“This year, we did get a chance to hold some in-person interviews,” Bianes said. “We had a little bit more [liberty]. We’re basically not as restricted in freedom or in the interview process, meaning that in some areas we could ask them [to do] something at the school.” 

According to 2020-2021 ASB Technology Commissioner, freshly elected ASB Vice President for the 2021-2022 school year and junior Michael Dimapilis, one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of the application process was determining who is filtered out and who stays at each step of the way. Dimapilis mentioned that the panel interview members looked at how applicants were “involved at school and spirited throughout [the] interview process.”

“When [we] look[ed] through their applications, [we] had to look through quite a while and what we noticed in those applications were how creative [or professional] their responses were,” Dimapilis said. “We see how involved [the applicants] are at the school and how spirited they are and throughout this interview process.” 

All in all, it appears that the ASB application process, under pandemic or not, will desire creative, professional and hardworking applicants the whole way through. However, to those who desire to apply, the general consensus amongst Huerta, Bianes and Dimapilis is to not fill oneself with anxiousness in the process and to simply apply in good spirits.

“I would just say to have fun with your interviews. Don’t take it too seriously. And if you get rejected don’t take it to heart,” Huerta said. “But if you get in, really give it 110 percent and just enjoy the time you have with the people around you, because you’re only in high school once, so you always want to make the best of it.”