Cameron Santiago is currently a PGE student in the Entrepreneurship & Associative Track and is President of NEOMA’s Junior Entreprise. It was in this capacity that she was invited to take part in the Recherche Talents programme on BFM Business. She tells us about this first experience on TV in an interview.

Cameron, how did you end up on the set of BFM Business as a student?

It came as a complete surprise. On Friday 22 September, I received a message from Alexandre de Almeida, the President of the Confédération Nationale des Junior-Entreprises, asking me if I was available to take part in a shoot scheduled for the following Monday.

I’m not familiar with the programme in question but I thought I couldn’t pass up this opportunity because it would give our organisation a lot of exposure. So, without further ado, I said yes straight away! Alexandre then explained to me that it was a reverse interview between several students, mostly from Junior Enterprises, and a business leader, whom we didn’t know at that stage.

From Friday to Monday, that doesn’t leave much time for preparation, does it?

The programme is called Recherche Talents and is hosted by Laure Closier. The concept is that of a reverse interview, in which the managers are interviewed by students. The aim for the candidate managers is to encourage students to join their company.

The day before filming, I found out that Charles Marinakis, Chairman of Century 21, would be on set, and that I would be joined by Théophile Duthoit, Chairman of the JE at Sciences Po Paris, and Clément Poyau, a student at ESCP.

The subject was therefore real estate and our questions had to be about the industry and Century 21. With my two fellow interviewers, we discussed and agreed on the different questions that each of us would ask. For my part, I chose to focus on CSR and housing accessibility.And what happened on the big day?

On Monday morning, 25 September, I went to Paris, straight to the BFM offices. There, I was asked to wait without any further information. It was the first time I’d been to a TV station and by this stage the stress was starting to build. Fortunately, I bumped into some students who were just coming out of a recording session for the same programme, and they told me that everything had gone well and that they’d been really well guided, which reassured me.

After 15 long minutes, an assistant came to get me and take me to the set where Laure Closier, the presenter, explained how things were going to work. She managed to put us at ease by reminding us that this was a perfectly normal discussion and that we shouldn’t pay any attention to the cameras!

The show isn’t broadcast live but the filming is done in 1 take, so there’s a bit of stress involved. The shoot lasted 20 minutes, it went very quickly and everything went really well. At the end of the discussion, the manager leaves the set and we debrief with the students and the presenter. Then it’s the other way round, the manager comes back for his report and we go backstage.

Watch the programme here

What will you take away from this experience?

It was a great opportunity to meet Charles Marinakis. He was really lovely, he answered our questions very openly and we continued talking for another 30 minutes after the programme.

For NEOMA’s Junior Entreprise it was also a tremendous opportunity, because at the start of the programme we were given a few minutes to introduce ourselves and talk about our organisation.

And on a more personal level, it was a great first experience, giving me the chance to go behind the scenes of a TV show as well as practice my journalistic skills during an interview!