Students Set Their Sights Toward the Future

When Eric Lilienfeld starts college next fall, he’ll have something pretty unusual to share with his fellow criminal justice majors: actual on-the-job experience at the Acton Police Department, where he took part in investigative procedures, crime scene techniques, scheduling processes, riding to accident scenes with police officers, and even a day at the shooting range.

Eric is among the seniors graduating from Acton-Boxborough Regional High School who recently participated in the school’s senior internship program, which placed students in a variety of jobs and settings for the first three weeks of May to help them gain experience in their intended college majors or fields, as well as to instill life skills necessary for making the transition from school to work.

Started in 1998 as a way to help some students not going to college get some work experience, the internship program has grown from an initial few participants to 72 this year and incorporates a wide array of industries and businesses locally and further afield, said Anne Kingan, school-business liaison for Acton Public Schools and the Acton-Boxborough Regional School District.

According to Kingan, while many of the job sites are long established, each year new ones are added via various outreach efforts, parent connections, and, if need be, “looking at the Internet or in the phone book for new opportunities” that align with particular students’ interests.

And in terms of the students who participate — roughly 15 percent of the graduating class — the program “doesn’t always attract the kids with the very best grades, or those whose track records would indicate they’d be amazingly successful. More important (than those qualities) is that the student show desire, motivation, focus and determination” for their intended work sites, said Kingan.

Those qualities are explored at length during the course of the year, as Kingan and Genevieve Hammond, senior seminar teacher and English department member, take interested students through a rigorous screening and preparation process that includes choosing a job site, preparing a resume, learning how to interview and more — steps Kingan said are crucial to the program’s success.

“We almost always get good feedback and all of the steps we go through are focused on ensuring that the intern is successful,” Kingan said. “They represent themselves, the school and all the other interns who might come after them.”

And the collective efforts show, say site supervisors. Detective Keith Campbell, the youth services officer for the Acton Public Schools and Lilienfeld’s supervisor, said the Acton Police Department has taken part in the internship program “from the ground up” and is seldom, if ever, disappointed with the results.

“It’s nice when the students are motivated and enthusiastic, and Eric certainly was,” said Campbell. “He had many questions, which really helps, and a strong interest (in law enforcement). I could tell he got a lot out of it.”

Lilienfeld echoed his supervisor’s words, saying his experiences at the police station — which Campbell said he and fellow officers tried to make as “well-rounded” as possible — helped affirm his interest to pursue a career in law enforcement.

“It was always an interest of mine, but during the internship I really got to learn how a lot of things work at a police station,” said Lilienfeld, who will attend Roger Williams College in Providence. “I really enjoyed the whole thing.”

Paul Kohout, an Acton resident and site supervisor at Lionbridge Technologies in Framingham, praised the industriousness and “youthful energy” brought to the job by his intern, Brendan Spangler, and said the experience — his company’s first with a high-school intern — affirmed a longtime interest of his to hire interns for short stints.

“Brendan’s energy level and enthusiasm really perked up the office,” Kohout said. “He had a positive attitude, was happy and excited and was willing to learn new things.” And, as it turned out, he had the chance to use certain skills unexpectedly: In addition to the jobs planned for Spangler, he was asked to translate Chinese documents, a task he may repeat soon as a summer intern at the company, said Kohout.

"It was nice using the language skills before I lost them over the summer," said Spangler, who plans to major in business with a minor in Chinese at Boston University. "I was not familiar with some of the words but my high school teacher, Amy Li, taught me sentence structures very well. Armed with an understanding of sentence structure and a Chinese dictionary it was fairly easy."

Some 22 students in all will continue at their internship sites over the summer, said Kingan, a “testament to the overall success and the culmination of a lot of effort and hard work.”

“It’s gratifying to us that in the students’ recent exit interviews, many of them asked if the internships could be extended beyond the three weeks or into the summer,” agreed Hammond.

Students share high points at post-internship gathering

A last step to the program was a recent breakfast meeting at ABRHS, at which school administrators weighed in about the program’s merits and which gave the interns a chance to sit in small groups facilitated by school staff and community members to share their experiences with their peers.

Stephen Mills, superintendent of the Acton and Acton-Boxborough Regional school districts, said he appreciated how such jobs teach students to be “responsible and creative,” adding that, “I almost think internships should be a requirement. It will really help prepare (students) for what it will be like in the real world.”

For her part, ABRHS principal Dr. Alixe Callen agreed with Mills, telling the students she “loved” hearing about their experiences and said she considered herself, and the students, “really lucky” to be at a school that afforded them such career-preparation opportunities.

In Callen’s group, Ezra Chamberlain recounted his experiences interning under the master electrician at Huntington Theater in Boston, saying it was a “fantastic” extension of his experiences in stage lighting as a Proscenium Circus member and that he “really wants to pursue the field” after attending Ithaca College for theater.

Another student, Cailin Flannery, in a group facilitated by A-B curriculum coordinator Deborah Bookis, told her peers that she “really enjoyed” her time interning in a kindergarten class at Blanchard Memorial School in Boxborough, where she accompanied the children on a field trip to Davis’ Farmland, among other “really fun things.”

“I really got such a warm feeling from the kids,” said Flannery, adding that she “definitely” wants to major in education.

While the majority of students worked with Kingan to find their internship sites, Sam Oppenheim secured his own post at Ace Hardware in Acton, having worked there part-time for the past several years. In his role as an intern, Oppenheim said, he learned more about the managerial aspects of the store — enjoyable, he said, despite the fact that on some days, “right after my internship ended, I’d have to go to work there.”

While Oppenheim’s planned college major, creative writing, doesn’t quite match his recent experience, he said it was worthwhile nonetheless as “something to fall back on” in today’s competitive and difficult job market, a sentiment echoed by Hammond.

“The world is demanding more of kids, and whatever experience they can get while we’re here to help them is a good thing,” she said. “I’m so proud of them all.”