“Senior internships are a great opportunity, because it forces you to have an idea of the real world,” Derrick Coney, a senior, said. Coney is a student in Berkeley High School’s Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) small learning community, which provides seniors with internship opportunities.
CAS seniors must devote 50 hours a year to whatever internship they choose to pursue. From Coney’s perspective, internships are opportunities for students to get ahead in terms of forming good judgement around the workplace and career choices. When it comes to handling a real job and preparing for a professional career post high school, Coney added, it is essential to have prior knowledge and experience. Coney’s internship is with an organization in San Francisco called SFFILM, where he learns about what characterizes a high quality film and how to apply this knowledge to the production and creation of cinema. Coney said that students learn “tips on screenwriting, cinematography, how to cast, how to manage your tone around people. Just because you’re the director, you’re not the boss. It’s a collaborative project.”
Bill Pratt, a CAS co-founder, lead, and CAS history teacher, explained how the goal of these internships is for students to get experience in fields that relate to CAS core themes — media literacy, social justice, and social change, namely — but that also align with their personal interests.
However, Pratt explained that having an internship directly relating to students’ personal interests can be unrealistic, depending on what they are, since students have such varying passions and hobbies. Pratt detailed two crucial questions for CAS students to consider while participating in their internships: “How does this work in whatever seemingly small way, to make a difference in the world, helping other people, or addressing a broader social issue or problem? That’s the first question. And then the second is, how is this experience going to allow you to get some exposure to and potentially develop some skills related to an area of interest you have for your life after high school?” Pratt said. One of the core themes of CAS is social justice, which aligns with the first question.
Jordan Fenigstein, a BHS senior in CAS, was able to find an internship that both helped the members of her community and related to her field of interest. Fenigstein’s internship is working with an ethnic studies program within Berkeley Unified School District. “We’re bringing ethnic studies to lower grades, so to middle school and elementary school,” Fenigstein explained, “We’re making curriculums and slideshows and going to schools and presenting them to the kids.”
“I really love concerts and live music, so I was like, why not? Now I learn how to be a part of the (background of live music and concerts),” Azi Levy, a BHS senior in CAS, explained how choosing her internship was a simple decision. Levy is interning at the UC Theater in their Concert Career Pathway, where she learns the background of making a live performance run smoothly on the floor of the theater, as well as backstage.
Levy has been enjoying the internship ever since she had to start workshops for it at the beginning of last summer. Since this particular internship is not facilitated by BHS, the beginning and end are flexible.
“It can be hard to schedule stuff, work, school, and internships but it’s great practice for life,” Levy said. Levy has already participated in numerous workshops for her internship throughout the summer and has experienced the difficulty of having to balance school work, a job, and an internship. Having to manage this workload as a high school student is an arduous task that challenges students to move outside of their comfort zone. While they can be difficult to navigate and balance with other responsibilities, they are foundational to prepare students to manage their life post-graduation.