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This spring marks the sixth year of the NCHS Senior Internship Program and there are 160 students —double the amount over last year. In all, 119 unique sites host the teens, and the internships vary from oyster farming to accounting, art galleries to the New Canaan Land Trust. Scroll through the photo gallery above for a look at where many of the NCHS seniors are working.
A director of executive recruiting at a Fortune 500 investment and insurance company told a room full of New Canaan High School seniors on Tuesday morning that she’s required to Google-search prospective employees prior to hiring them. The Hartford does formal background checks on everyone it hires, Stephanie Scoon said during a workshop for this year’s participants in the NCHS Senior Internship Program, “but believe me we do go on social media as recruiters.”
“We are required to do so, to see what that person’s online presence looks like, and it has prevented us from moving forward,” Scoon said during the workshop, held in the Wagner Room at the high school. “So please, just remember: Be very careful about what is out there about you.”
She addressed about 165 NCHS seniors participating in “SIP,” as the Senior Internship Program is known—an opt-in program overseen by Sue Carroll of the NCHS College & Career Center that sees students apply for and, in nearly all cases, find placement for the final month of their academic career here in an area business, working as an intern in lieu of attending class. David Dayya, a participant in the program this year, said he applied for SIP in order to expand in-class, “theoretical learning” on campus to “the real world.”
“Sort of apply a practical application to what we are learning in school and start finding out more about what it’s going to be like to have a job,” Dayya said during a break in the workshop. He’ll spend the final month of his NCHS career with Filling In The Blanks, a nonprofit organization launched in 2014 by two local women that helps ensure area students whose weekday meals are obtained through vouchers at a school cafeteria also have enough to eat when school’s out (weekends and summers).
The Senior Internship Program at New Canaan High School has grown so popular that organizers need more area businesses and organizations to participate in order to place all the work experience-hungry students now applying. Some 100 NCHS seniors already have applied for the program, which will see participating students work as interns for the final month of the academic year in lieu of attending classes. That’s already up from 80 total participants last year, and with an application deadline set for Wednesday, some 125 total students are likely to put in for the program, according to Susan Carroll, who oversees the SIP program as coordinator of the College and Career Center at NCHS. One reason for the program’s soaring popularity is that members of the class of 2016 have always associated senior year at New Canaan High School with the Senior Internship Program, now in its sixth year, Carroll said. “It’s more ingrained than ever before,” Carroll said.
Starting May 18 and for a full month, New Canaan High School senior Mackenzie Lewis will help us report on what’s happening in town through the increasingly popular NCHS Senior Internship Program. An Elon University-bound student-athlete who has been a staffer at the high school paper, the Courant, for two years, Mackenzie is a native New Canaanite who entered NCHS as a sophomore from New Canaan Country School. Over the next four-plus weeks, you’ll see her byline appear as she reports hard news (police, government, schools), spot features downtown and profiles of local residents and businesses. We talked about her interest in journalism and experience at the Courant on a recent afternoon as the first day of the internship approaches. Here’s our conversation:
New Canaanite: What made you want to do the Senior Internship Program?
In some ways, New Canaan High School senior Fiona Risom already has gained plenty of work experience. A competitive sailor, she’s been a junior instructor for seven summers and has her sights set this year on getting paid to run her own class at a yacht club in Westchester. Risom also worked as a paid coach for the New Canaan Lacrosse Association last spring. Yet—until now—she’s never worked in an office setting before. “I’m hoping to get experience,” Risom said after school Thursday, speaking of her participation in the NCHS Senior Internship Program.