Intern class becoming more popular at Milford High

Seven students may not seem like much to some people, but it was enough for the Milford High School internship program to start its yearly offerings in the 2008-09 school year. The program started with 14 students attending the class per year, which doubled to a maximum of 28 students who have the potential to take the class each year. It all actually started in the 2007-08 school year, when a great demand arose among the students for a class about professionalism in the workplace, which resulted in the creation of the internship class. Students in the class fill out a paper with their job preferences so that the teacher, Richard Paiva, can find a suitable company that would like to have an MHS student for an intern. Once a company accepts a student, they negotiate appropriate hours. Once the students have their hours with the company, they go with the flow of the internship, but if they hit a snag, they can easily approach the mentor they were assigned to once they earned the internship. “I took the career focus internship class to intern somewhere that would give me a feel for what I want to do in the future, and Sunrise Children’s Center did just that,” senior Kathryn Johnson said. Of course, no class would be complete without assignments to evaluate how well the student intern adapts to the workplace and participates in the internship. First, the student has to have a minimum of 65 hours in order to pass the course. Second, the student has an option to either write weekly journal entries that summarize what they learned at their internship sites or to write a five-page essay about what he or she learned at the internship for a grade. Finally, at the end of the semester, the students must present a project that summarizes what they encountered and understood from their internship. Obviously, there are many fields of study in which students are interested, but the most currently seem to be computer sciences, health science and engineering, with a few choosing animal science, fashion design and administration. Some popular companies among the interns are Hitchiner Manufacturing Co., Southern New Hampshire Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital. There are students who travel as far as Peterborough and Manchester, but most don’t stray any farther than those boundaries. After receiving 48 class requests last year, the student services faculty is thinking about expanding the class to two classes per semester and adding a new class that explains to students the basics and detail of how a workplace operates. For more information about the intern program, e-mail Paiva at rpaiva@sau40.com. Maria Romanenko is a sophomore at Milford High School.