Revere internship option explodes in popularity

by Sheldon Ocker

It’s probably a no-brainer for most 18-year-olds or 28-year-olds or even 88-year-olds.

Revere High School seniors have the following option: They can finish the last three weeks of their scholastic careers going to class for about 70 hours, or they can opt into the school’s internship program and shadow someone in the workplace for 20 or 30 hours. 

Moreover, students who choose the internship route don’t take final exams.

“When you’d get to May, the seniors kind of checked out,” said business education teacher Jeff Dallas. “So instead of going to the last few weeks of class then taking exams, we let them job shadow.”

The internship program acts as an extension of Revere’s Future Day, when earlier in the school year seniors can visit colleges or do job shadowing.

Interns work 30 days with local (or distant) volunteer companies or 20 days if they are taking Advanced Placement tests.

“We think this is more meaningful than drudging through the last few weeks of senior year,” Dallas said. 

When counselor Emily Rion, co-chair of the program with Dallas, left Nordonia schools to take a job at Revere, she brought the internship concept with her. She and Dallas get lots of help from Nancy Vondrak, a career specialist at Revere and Cuyahoga Valley Career Center.

When the program started five years ago, some Revere administrators thought it would attract a modest number of participants.

“One principal said, ‘I hope you get 30 students,’” Dallas said. “We ended up getting 93.”

That turned out to be only a good start. Last year, Dallas said 95% of the senior class took advantage of the internship option.

“I think there were eight kids who didn’t do it,” he said. “It has grown exponentially.”

Dallas figures that the overwhelming majority of the senior class, which numbers more than 200, will choose to get acquainted with potential vocations again this spring.

“I think part of it, for sure, is they just want to get out of school those three weeks and not take exams,” Dallas said. “But they have to come back and make a presentation with a Google slideshow and go over everything they did.”

Most Revere kids go to college, yet that doesn’t preclude them from taking on an internship. But not every Revere senior ends up at a four-year university.

“There have been business people who have given them their cards and said, ‘When you’re done [with graduation] call me,’” Dallas said. “‘If I’m not hiring, I probably know someone who is.’”

Trying on a job, even superficially, can help the seniors decide their futures, and an internship can be the first meaningful way to learn networking.

Dallas said interns have a lengthy choice of work. Revere seniors have found lawyers, dentists, doctors, accountants, landscapers, Metro Parks employees, construction workers, funeral directors, police, teachers, large businesses (Goodyear, Gojo, Smithers, Cleveland Clinic, Morgan Stanley), museum curators, TV and radio staffers, actors and musicians but especially nurses.

“I think nursing has been very popular, for sure,” said Dallas, who was invited to the Cleveland Clinic last year to learn about their personnel needs. They wanted an ultrasound technician and a respiratory therapist.

After getting their two-year degrees, the job candidates were hired at starting salaries of more than $70,000 a year plus a $5,000 signing bonus.

“Last year we had a girl in nursing, and the adviser emailed me about how she handled something in a great way,” Dallas said. “She experienced something I wish she hadn’t – she had to watch a person pass away.”

As Vondrak said, even seniors who have shadowed doctors “do more than watch. They are doing things. They get to be hands-on. The last two years, the Crystal Clinic has had one of our seniors. One girl who did this in 2023 got hired by the Clinic.”

So volunteering to become an intern can be more satisfying than merely cutting the last three weeks of school.“After the first year, I got a message from one former student who said, ‘Please make sure you keep doing this,’” Dallas said. “‘This is so much more valuable than going to school the last three weeks.’”