Many teachers fall into a habitual lull after their first few years of teaching. However, for Bethany Everidge, a personal finance and economics teacher from the Career and Technical Education Department, her job is kept interesting daily from the new Career Experience Program that she is heading this year.

The Career Experience Program provides an opportunity for students to become involved with careers of their interest, and it is presented through three different experiences.

“We have job shadowing, which is a snapshot of a career of a student interest, we have our mentorship program, where students are scheduled with me to work on workplace readiness skills and then spend a majority of their time out in the community working with a mentor, then our internship program is developing as far as where it’s going. It could turn into either a payment internship or even a free internship experience,” Everidge said.

The CEP intends for students to go through the mentorship aspect first, before going through the internship. The internship does not involve a classroom component, because students are spending everyday, schedule permitting, in the job.

The job shadowing experience is also very helpful when students are deciding what careers interest them. Everidge takes small groups of about four to six students, and they often get to sit down and speak with the actual professionals in the job that interests them. They hear about what sort of things the job requires such as education needed, and the daily routine of the profession. So far this year, Everidge has taken students to a job site with an architect, a mechanical and electrical engineer, and students even got to go to the courthouse and jail and speak with employees there. This allows students to get a quick snapshot of what goes on in the careers, and enables them to compare it to what they originally thought about the career.

The job shadowing experience also lets students figure out what they don’t want to do, which can be just as helpful when thinking about careers.

“While they may come back and say ‘I really didn’t like that’, that’s good. They have eliminated something and they can refocus and we can have that discussion about what they think they want to do, and so we look and go into a different direction,” Everidge said.

Even though the program is a few months old, Everidge already has plans for year two of the CEP. Currently, the program is open to 11th and 12th graders, and next year she would like to open it up to 10th graders as well. She would also like to see more diversity among the program, and have more kids that didn’t have a direction to begin with. From a community standpoint, Everidge would like to have more involvement from the local programs.

“I would like to have more conversations with local colleges and technical centers and community members, about what they really want from our high school, and what kind of classes they want to see you guys in here, what kind of service stuff and clubs they want to see you in, so HHS students can become more aware of what their future plans for colleges would like to see from them in the future,” Everidge said.

Despite the the stress and immense amount of planning that goes into starting a new program, Everidge has found personal learning experiences for her career as well.

“It’s opened up my eyes that knowledge is the best power for you guys to understand, so it has definitely pointed me in a different direction in my career, from what I was doing last year. Teaching is still my passion, so I still teach mentorship and two classes of personal finance and economics, each year besides mentorship, so I get a two for one,” Everidge said.

Despite the many aspects of the new Career Experience Program, Everidge’s pitch from the very beginning has been allowing students to find a passion for a career that they didn’t even realize they had. The program allows students to realize that sometimes what they think they want to be isn’t what they have a love for, and when Everidge’s main goal is to make sure students love what they do, because then it is not work, but a passion.

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Seniors Atticus Bolyard and Rozda Askari.