Editor’s note: The following was written by Sheela Clary in her capacity as a staff member of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District.
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This article is part of a regular series out of Berkshire Hills Regional School District in which we share student and staff news and learning for the goal of increasing communication touchpoints between the community and its public schools.
It wasn’t your grandma’s Career Day last week at Monument Mountain Regional High School (MMRHS), as seniors served as experts alongside visiting professionals, students exchanged investment advice, and a dog named Archer made his rounds.
Career Day was inaugurated by the Monument Guidance department in 2019 as a way to help 10th grade students begin to envision and make real a range of possible educational and professional futures. Career Day, like everything else, took a COVID break, but it has since rebounded, grown, and expanded its partnerships. On Wednesday, November 13, 43 community members representing 11 different career sectors, and including 14 Monument alums and 11 current MMRHS parents, spent three morning class periods sharing wisdom gleaned from failures, missteps, wins, and wrong turns on their often circuitous paths to success in their chosen fields.
Guidance Counselor Sean Flynn, now in his 27th year in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, kicked off the morning by encouraging the visitors to recall themselves as high schoolers and, through that lens, to take today’s sophomore students as they are, now. “All of your experiences were not necessarily linear. They very often came from moments of falling short, or having a big pivot based on some experience. This is not about deciding what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives today. It’s about taking the risk of engaging. It’s about going into small conversations and being active listeners. It’s important that they are seen for who they are now and who they are becoming.”
To increase the likelihood of the 10th graders seeing themselves in the panelists, several senior student interns were also asked to participate, “So that kids could maybe see a future orientation not far away from them,” Flynn explained. In this vein, Jade Abderhalden, who is interning with the West Stockbridge Police Department, took questions alongside some of her future colleagues, uniformed police officers on the Police and Protective Services panel. “She made a big difference,” commented guidance counselor Marcie Velasco. “Jade was amazing in there. She came out and said, ‘They keep asking me all the questions!’” As part of her internship, Abderhalden gets to be part of dispatch and see all aspects of what our small-town law enforcement work entails.
During fourth period at least, the audience during the police was all female students interested in going into the field and asking very detailed questions about what course sequences, degrees, and experience it took to get there, and also what other career paths call on similar skills and interests. “Every kid who went in there came out like, ‘Wow, that was great,’” noted Velasco.
Other upper-class student experts were brought in by science teacher Jamie Downer, whose Healthcare Pathway students shared their expertise, as well as some of art teacher Krista Dalton’s advanced portfolio students. “Everyone got a lot out of that.” (There are currently 45 Monument Mountain seniors on internships working on farms and in nonprofits, interior design offices, restaurants, mechanic shops, hospitals, and alongside electricians.)
The finance and small-business sectors were well represented and their sessions well attended at Career Day, with several tables full of students eager for business advice. Melissa Mae of Evoque Investments presided over one of these tables, where she found students deeply interested in learning all about entrepreneurship, the state of the stock market and investing, and financial empowerment more broadly. “They all had such great ideas,” Mae said of the nearly three dozen students she met with. “Most of them were so curious and enthusiastic, also shy, but wanting to know more about the world of owning a business and how it’s possible.”
Other popular circles revolved around the automotive profession, led by auto teacher Chris D’Aniello, and featuring three representatives from Haddad Auto Group and Dominic Lydon of Autobahn in Great Barrington. Interspersed with troubleshooting an overheating Subaru, the group were treated to the inside stories of how the adults were just like them back in the day. Jason Higgins of Haddad was a 1993 alumnus of Monument Mountain and of his own high school experience said, “I had no idea what to do with my life. At that point we didn’t have this, we didn’t have people coming in from the community.”
After jumping around in the industry and working his way up, Higgins has found his place as a general manager for Haddad, which employees 113 people. “There are so many facets to this business. Once you understand what Mr. D’Aniello is teaching you,” he advised, “you can do pretty much anything.”
Dominic Lydon grew up on a farm in Ireland, and is self taught. He has owned his own successful auto repair shop for 20 years. Both Haddad and Autobahn host Monument interns, and Lydon pointed out that he once had an intern who went to work on Black Hawk helicopters in the military.
A recurring theme on Career Day was the way in which many people end up accessing a field related to their passions, but through a side door. Dr. Joshua Pacheco, an emergency room doctor at Fairview Hospital, advised Sam Barcenas, who is interested in both sports and medicine, about opportunities at the intersection of those interests. “I had a friend who blew out his knee, and he was a big athlete himself,” he said. “He had his knee fixed by a surgeon who fixes all the ACLs of the Division 1 basketball players throughout Connecticut. So there are sports people who translate their passion into providing healthcare.” Students heard similar stories about a star Monument baseball player who now works in online video production for Major League Baseball, as well as a talented Monument artist who now has a good job doing graphic design for the Golden State Warriors.
Dr. Pacheco has three children in BHRSD schools, and last Wednesday was his second time at Career Day. He finds that the amount of time it takes to earn a medical degree is a tough pill for many students to swallow. “I try to provide advice about keeping an open mind. A lot of people hear that it’s eight years, 10 years. But you have to do something with your life. The time frame is, on one level, irrelevant as long as you’re moving toward something you’re enjoying.” He also had an important, if age-old, reflection to share related to what really matters if you want to be good at your job. “As much as there are technical aspects to medicine, the more I’ve grown in my career, I feel like the most relevant aspect is still your ability to communicate with other humans.”
The winner of the morning’s popularity contest would have to be the only non-human in attendance: therapy dog Archer, whose job, as described by his trained handler, Great Barrington Police Officer Sam Riva, is “to bring comfort anywhere and everywhere.” He is quite a teacher.
The guidance counselors, for their part, are always pleasantly surprised by the students in whom they see a much higher level of engagement than they would have anticipated based on past experience. “Every year the kids we least expect get the most out of it,” noted Velasco. Future years will likely include an expansion for the roles played by older students, teaching their younger counterparts. Said Flynn, “There’s power in the mentoring that can happen between our upperclassmen and 9th graders and middle school students.”
