Medha Sarin
Roswell Tribune
msarin@elritomedia.com
Edith Segura eagerly opened her email account on June 1, waiting for a message of acceptance or rejection. She was competing with over 5,000 applicants to participate in a network of high school internships across the state.
The New Mexico Summer Enrichment Program places students in paid internships at local businesses, teaching career skills and preparing them for the workforce.
With her email acceptance, Segura, 17, of Roswell became one of 2,200 students enrolled in an eight-week summer internship with the program. A dedicated member of her school’s HOSA (Future Health Professionals) club, Segura envisioned a future career in medicine.
“As long as I was in a health setting, I was gonna be happy,” Segura said. “If I would have gotten placed somewhere else, I would have been like, ‘What the heck? What did I sign myself up for?’”
The state of New Mexico originally ran the program before it changed hands this year, partnering with national nonprofit Education at Work. Former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift heads the organization.
“We believe that the best way to create social mobility is to help students successfully pair education with high-quality paid work experiences,” said Swift, who governed Massachusetts from 1999 to 2003. “They get the skills, experience and connections that will help them to get a good first job.”
Some Roswell participants interned at Tadpoles Daycare and Pioneer Bank, while Segura worked at a women’s health clinic, Rio Pecos. The highschooler shadowed medical assistants and doctors, chatted with patients and did basic procedures like recording vitals and blood pressure.
Segura even watched procedures like Pap smears, IUD insertions and birth control implant removals. While shadowing a visiting ultrasound technician, Segura had the chance to do her own practice ultrasound on the medical professional.
“Students get both career exploration as well as some hands-on experience about what that job actually entails,” Swift said.
The internship taught Segura something deeply valuable: which medical professions she did not want to pursue. She remembered fainting after watching a procedure for removing Nexplanon, a birth control implant, she said.
She chalked up that moment to “first-day jitters,” but felt “queasy” once again after seeing an IUD insertion the next day.
Initially planning to become an X-ray technician, Segura decided to look into other medical professions, she said.
“It’s very eye-opening,” she said of the internship. “It was very fun for me to actually work with these people that have built their careers where they want to be.”
Career readiness
New this year, students created “community impact projects” over the course of their internships. Split into teams, they each designed a method to support their community and fulfill local needs.
One Roswell group created an online directory of local businesses offering discounts to students with a valid school ID. The project would “give students an affordable place to be outside of home and school,” wrote Katherine Griffin, an Education at Work spokesperson, in an email to the Roswell Tribune.
The team pitched the idea to 20 businesses throughout the city, and 18 responded with interest in joining such a directory, Griffin wrote.
Another group designed a “bilingual voucher system connecting students with free food, clothing and hygiene products” from community partners, and a third “offered a weeklong career readiness bootcamp for students and young adults,” wrote Griffin.
Segura’s team chose to design a community garden. She said residents could purchase a $5 plot of land to grow flowers or vegetables of choice. As the plants bloomed, community members could use the resulting landscape for various needs.
“Photographers could rent it out and then they’d have the garden to themselves,” she suggested. “It would look pretty.”
Swift said the process built “career readiness,” as the students presented their projects to each other and to local businesses at the program’s end.
“By seeing students committed to things they care about and wanting to make their community better, seeing them engaged in work and really interested in the kinds of jobs that exist within their community, I think it’s uplifting for those businesses,” Swift said.
