26 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY december 5-11, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com internships with local business partners. “If I show you a video or I talk to you about it, that’s one thing, but if I put you in on the factory floor and you’re interfacing with people who are doing the data entry, or whatever the profession is, then it sparks a deeper sense of, ‘This could be something I want to do,’” Sanchez says. Soledad Unified has an in-house internship program for students in the education pathway’s second year. Before going to class, SUSD interns spend an hour at a nearby elementary school. Giselle Lucio Elizalde is a Soledad High School senior, and an intern at Rose Ferrero Elementary. Every morning before going to school she works from 8-9am with third-graders and special ed students, helping them with their assignments. Lucio Elizalde enrolled in the education courses because she was looking for a job; her goal is to become a traveling nurse. Student interns work five hours a week, earning minimum wage, while also developing teaching skills. The education field is highly promoted among students due to a local and nationwide teacher shortage, but Defendis knows many students may choose to take their careers in a different direction. He says exposing students to different paths provides a bigger picture of what they can accomplish. For example, trusting a 4.0 GPA student to repair a car—or encouraging a 2.5 student to pursue a college degree. “They could be a teacher or a lawyer. I think that perspective is good, and it doesn’t happen unless they’re exposed to both,” Defendis says. Even if graduates choose a different field, like a teaching student going into nursing, Defendis says it’s still a benefit: They are learning real-life skills in a professional setting, applicable for just about anything. And they will have insight into how public education works, something that can help them when they become parents and enroll their own children in school, or when voting for school district bond measures. Besides giving them work experience, it is hopefully making them better citizens. One advantage of CTE is that students also can get involved in a project they may not be able to afford on their own, especially if they are from low-income families. One of those subjects is robotics. This year Seaside High School students are working on a drone that will measure the ocean current as part of the Naval Postgraduate School’s design challenge, where students create solutions to tackle climate change challenges. These projects are expensive—registration for the international FIRST Robotics competition is $6,000 and building a 150-pound robot can cost up to $3,000. “If we don’t offer something like this to all high school students, then you’ll have an inequality issue, right? So only students who can afford to do this get into the STEM fields,” says Michelle Chen, Seaside High School robotics instructor. Nate Reid, 17, a senior at Seaside High School, is interested in biomedical engineering and 3-D printing technology, and potentially producing human organs. So far, he’s learned to use computer-aided designs to create 3-D prints of useful tools like a phone case. The FIRST Robotics competition requires students with different skill sets collaborate to bring a robotics project to fruition. “It does serve a purpose for a lot of different jobs,” Chen says. “In the competition, these students are working as a group, so they learn very quickly how to work as a team and communicate as a team. In competition, they are under stress, and they are expected to be professional and gracious at all times so they’re learning a lot of soft skills.” Students learn about custom design and fabrication, building mechanisms, coding, and assembling and working collaboratively with peers; some design the robots, some make instructional videos or design the project’s identity. “If we want to prepare our students for careers that are competitive and high-paying, we need to give them the opportunity in high school,” Chen says. “If they’re not exposed to it in high school, how will they know to pick that major in college?” When she was in high school, Chen says she was never exposed to fields that she might pursue, because she did not know where the path might lead. “I had no idea what engineering was, and so I missed out and I didn’t get into this until later in my life,” she says. “This is why I feel like it’s really important to get exposure in high school; I wasted my time the first time I went to college. So once I figured out what I really wanted to do, I re-enrolled, I went to UC Irvine, and got another bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.” When she attended an all girls’ school in Texas in the 1970s, elective classes included home economics, sewing and crochet. “It was a very unfair, uneven opportunity,” she notes. Every year, about 20 MPUSD students work up to 16 hours a week in paid or unpaid internships in a variety of fields, including within the school district, and in the business and hospitality industry, including at The Lodge at Pebble Beach and Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa. Interns experience firsthand the work experience, from putting together a resume and submitting an application to showing up on time and following instructions. And in some cases, the training leads directly to a job. For the past three years, The Lodge has hired interns out of MPUSD’s culinary programs; about 10 students apply and three or four get hired every year. “Students get paid to work, then they graduate, and they just keep working, then they start to climb that ladder into this industry that they wouldn’t have had without the workbased learning push,” Sanchez says. Benjamin Brown, executive chef for The Lodge, says MPUSD interns “have a very unique opportunity to work in a world-renowned resort that is right here in their backyard.” Brown notes he didn’t have similar opportunities when he was in high school in the early ’90s in Lake Tahoe: ”I don’t think we had a culinary program,” he says. The chef and his team have an open house where they share details with advanced culinary students at Marina and Seaside high schools about Pebble Beach Company, show them the facilities and talk about career opportunities at The Lodge. The interns learn basic culinary skills in their CTE culinary program, and staff at The Lodge evaluates their skills before onboarding them. “If I see that an intern has really good fine motor skills, we might place them in a fine dining restaurant,” Brown says. Interns rotate to different areas, including bakery, the pizza oven or banquets. Brown says besides developing hard skills and experience, interns also learn communication skills and work independently. Brown has hired at least three students for full-time positions who are earning over $20 per hour, plus company benefits. Lyndsey Alvarez guides students to spot right and wrong ways to attend to patients as they watch a video, part of the Patient Care Pathway at Soledad High. Zabdiel Arciga, 15, is learning about ophthalmology in the Patient Care and Personal Wellness CTE class at Marina High School. As part of an assignment, he cleans and fixes glasses. Celia Jiménez Celia Jiménez
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