As a Sociology major, the topic of education has been brought up countless times in my classes. The high school I had the pleasure of interning for this summer has created an innovative solution to the problem of education inequality. Cristo Rey New York High School students come from some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City and do not have other opportunities to attend schools that would prepare them for college. The school makes this possible by placing the students in paid internships, which covers  45% of their tuition. This means that the students only attend school four days a week and work the fifth. The Development Department also covers 45% through fundraising, and the remaining 10% comes from tuition fees paid by the students’ families.

My time this summer was split between two departments within the high school – the Development Department and the Corporate Work Study Department. While I worked in the Development Department my first month, I worked with a team of five women in their late twenties and early thirties. During my month with them, they had two focuses – reaching their financial goal because their fiscal year was coming to an end and preparing for their  10 year anniversary event. Many of my responsibilities revolved around preparing, stuffing, and mailing donation requests to individuals and companies for both. I also updated the school’s website, created spreadsheets of where students from each graduated class went to college, wrote thank you letters to donors, analyzed auction trends from their galas, helped clean out the office, and edited information on their database. It was great being in such a small office because not only did I get to know each of the women in my department, but I also was exposed to what the President and the Accounting Department do on a daily basis because we all shared a wing of the building.

During Puente, Cristo Rey hired six currently enrolled students to help with the incoming students and be role models for the incoming students. On the left is one of these students, Tyre, who is starting her senior year in the fall. We took this photo while we were on a walk through Central Park, which was part of the Healthy Lifestyles course that I taught with the other college interns.

My second month, in the Corporate Work Study Department, was very different than when I was with Development. Three weeks of summer are dedicated to Puente, which is an orientation for incoming freshmen and transfer sophomores. In the mornings, the students took Math and English courses so that they could be caught up academically and, in the afternoons, they took courses to prepare themselves for their internships during the school year. My time mostly revolved around the classroom and the students; in the mornings, I was a Teaching Assistant to an English Teacher and, in the afternoons, I oversaw the internship classes because each class was taught by a different supervisor from the companies that hire the students.

My favorite part of my internship this summer, though, was knowing that what I was dedicating my time to was meaningful to someone. The students were an absolute delight to work with and get to know.

Editor’s Note: This guest blogger was a 2014 Scripps College Internship Grant recipient. To learn more about the 2015 Internship Grant process, click here.  Deadline Feb. 5.