Internships give students chance to preview careers

With annual college tuition expenses reaching as high as $35,000, parents want to have some sense that their child is heading toward a career that fits their offspring’s abilities, interests and passions. One way to find out is for the student to complete a for-credit internship while in high school.
“Any experience that exposes young people to career opportunities is valuable,” says Carol Silver Elliott, president and CEO of Career Development Services Inc. “High school internships are great because they help students understand what the world of work looks like.”
One-day experiences, such as Take Your Daughter/Son to Work Day or shadowing arrangements that enable a student to spend a day with a professional in the community, are beneficial as well, Elliott notes. But they are not as enlightening as a long-term, multi-month internship, during which “students really have the chance to get their hands into something and take on real project responsibility.”
Robert Kirk, news director for WROC-TV 8, agrees. While his station has hosted numerous young students during Take Your Daughter/Son to Work Day, a six-month internship fulfilled a few years back by a junior from Pittsford-Mendon High School was beneficial not only to the student but to the news department as well.
“We put our intern to work immediately, and she quickly became a member of the team,” he recalls. “She accompanied reporters in the field as they developed stories. She wrote copy for stories, which then was edited by our staff, as is all text. She had the opportunity to observe how videographers and producers do their job. Overall, she had a well-rounded experience.”
The newsroom staff benefited as well. “We’re always swamped, so it was nice to have an extra pair of hands to help out and get a story started,” he says.
While Channel 8 since has used the services of a few college interns, it has not yet had another high school intern. But Kirk would not hesitate to make such an arrangement “if the right person once again comes along.”
Contacts from local corporations, non-profits and health care facilities willing to take on an intern are a critical key for the success of such an experience, says Yvonne O’Shea, principal of Victor Senior High School.
Employers have opened their doors to Victor students-typically juniors or seniors-to help them get a sense of the world of work.
As a result, roughly 40 students each semester have worked in settings as diverse as an architectural firm and a pharmacy, a veterinarian’s office and a physical therapy center.
“The point of an internship is to test reality,” O’Shea explains. “A student might think she wants to become a lawyer but really doesn’t know what the day-to-day life of a lawyer is all about. An internship helps her to better understand that career.”
Suzanne Herrgesell is Victor’s school-to-career coordinator who oversees the internship program as well as the school’s one-week shadowing project. The latter, offered through the school’s career exploration unit, attracted 256 students during the 2002-2003 academic year, O’Shea says.
Through this shadowing program, students-individually or in small groups-had the chance to visit a number of settings and learn what people do for a living. Opportunities ranged from shadowing local politicians and asking questions of the production staff at Geva Theatre, to learning about massage therapy at Scott Miller Salon & Spa and assisting journalists at Messenger-Post Newspapers.
In addition, students can attend career awareness sessions during study hall periods and listen to guest speakers talk about their chosen fields.
“We’ve run the internship and shadowing programs for four to five years,” O’Shea says, “and the feedback from students and employers alike has been extremely positive. Typically, kids who do internships absolutely love them.”
Such is the case at Honeoye Falls-Lima Senior High School, too, reports Christine DeFranco, career education coordinator for the 900-student facility.
Internships are run through the school’s economics classes, and students in those classes are given a choice of either undertaking a 30-hour internship or producing a senior project. The majority do the former, DeFranco says.
“Internships provide a connection between what students will study in college with the real world,” she says. “With so many colleges out there, it helps for kids to try on a career for size as an intern and get a sense of whether they are heading toward the right college and academic major.”
DeFranco starts talking up the internship program during students’ freshman year, letting them know what is to come a few years down the road. Then, when students take economics in their junior or senior year and express an interest in an internship, she meets with them individually to assess their interests and strengths. She then contacts prospective “mentors,” many of whom have welcomed Honeoye Falls-Lima interns for years.
In settings as varied as the surgical unit at F.F. Thompson Health, the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office and local engineering firms, 130 students served as interns during this past academic year.
Students keep a weekly journal about their experiences, and mentors provide a candid evaluation when the internship is completed.
Internships are so valuable because they can help a student decide whether a par-
ticular area of interest truly is a good fit, CDS’ Elliott says.
“It is as powerful a learning experience to eliminate things from your list of choices as it is to add to your list,” she says. “Internships can help students make better long-term judgments.”
Such was the case for Joy Newman, a June 2002 graduate of Pittsford-Sutherland High School, who completed a yearlong internship during the 2000-01 academic year in the pediatric emergency department at Rochester General Hospital.
Newman sought out the internship as a way to discover whether a career as a physician was the right fit for her. She worked four hours a week at RGH and says the experience was “invaluable.”
“I learned a lot about the systems within emergency departments and how they work,” she explained. “I worked closely with residents and attending physicians, describing outpatient services to patients, assisting with applying stitches, even translating for Spanish-speaking patients.”
By working weekly at the hospital for nine months, Newman obtained a realistic perspective on the medical profession-at least in a hospital emergency department setting-and concluded that it was not the right career choice for her due to the rigorous lifestyle and time schedule demands of the profession.
Still, the internship helped Newman refine her professional plans.
Now a sophomore at the University of Rochester, she is leaning toward a career in educational administration, with plans to teach either health or social studies. So her interest in science-evident long before her high school internship-has not wavered; it has simply pointed toward a different path.
Career education coordinator DeFranco applauds Newman’s experience.
“Internships are a great way for students to develop their career portfolios, and the earlier they start thinking about the world of work, the better,” she says. “Most students will change their minds at least a few times about their preferred field of work, but early exposure to the possibilities gives them an excellent starting point.”
(Debbie Waltzer is a Rochester-area free-lance writer.)

08/01/03 (C) Rochester Business Journal