By Jamilé Paulino
I am an indecisive person. I like all subjects in school pretty much equally. This could become a big problem when I choose my major and career since I could go into any career and end up miserable. As a high school student I started thinking I wanted to go into business to be an event planner, and as a result I started planning small events at my community center. Consequently, I realized that event planning wasn’t for me. It wasn’t until I retook sexual education that I realized that public health was something I enjoyed.. Now, after interning at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, I know that going into the medical field is what I would like to do. If more students were able to try out their career interests in high school they would be able to realize what is or what’s not for them.
If the Boston Public Schools partner with institutions to create opportunities for students to explore potential career interests in high school, students will be able to start giving thought to what careers they may or may not want to pursue. Students who have internships gain so much more than their peers who don’t. As the Director of Corporate Study at Cristo Rey High School in Boston Anita Fulco said, “Students with internships are able to develop their professional skills, they have a greater maturity than their peers in other schools because of having to balance work and school, they learn time-management skills, and [they learn] how to communicate with adults.”[1]
An internship looks great on a resume, and it helps with college. Students become more well-rounded and are more prepared for the harsh demands of college. Students begin to develop both hard and soft skills through these opportunities.
Since students have to balance internships, school, possibly another job, and their personal lives, it can become a lot. However, I spoke with Ruben Vazquez, a freshman at Cristo Rey. Ruben said, “Since it’s only one day a week it’s not that hard to keep up with and helps you experience how a real job is.”[2] Students are also able to network through these jobs. Senior Jerlin Mejia said, “I worked at the front desk at the Franklin Park Zoo one summer because Ihad experience doing office work and picking up phone calls at my corporate work study.”[3]
Having high school students as interns “relieves the bottlenecks so employees can complete higher-level work. It’s also a great way to boost morale by helping bridge the achievement gap, and it can bring in a great deal of diversity to the company…and helps them train a workforce,”[4] said Anita Fulco. At Cristo Rey Boston where they send their students to be interns at all types of institutions, the students don’t get paid directly; instead, the money is used to pay their high school tuition. This system would have to be adapted in the BPS because, unlike a private school, we don’t pay tuition.
I believe that we should have our own program like Cristo Rey, but instead of nonprofits and businesses, we would have our students interning everywhere from hospitals to mechanical garages. However, that’s a lot of students scattered all around Boston. We would need to enable positions to manage these students in every school. There are 125 schools in the BPS network, meaning we would need 125 partnership directors so each school had its own. Plus, we would need one director to be in charge of all of the partnerships in the entire BPS. This would create a huge network so that everyone had support. We could use the money earn to pay the different directors and to fund the schools because as it is BPS doesn’t really have that much money.
No matter how long it takes, or how expensive, I’m sure that it’ll be worth it.
Partnering with institutions will have so many benefits in the long run that we won’t even think about all time it took to incorporate: making students well-rounded and helping them to know what they want to do as a career; giving them with their resumes and developing both soft and hard skills;. building bridges between institutions and schools that could last for years. Finally, these partnerships could make students ready for all the rigorous demands of college and life. No matter how long it takes, or how expensive, I’m sure that it’ll be worth it.
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