Like most 16-year-olds, Lissette of Minneapolis has a lot on her plate.
Between completing her education at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, looking after her little brother, and teaching herself to play an impressive number of musical instruments, it’s sometimes hard to get a little extra sleep, let alone dedicate herself to service work.
Nonetheless, Lissette is also providing some valuable time and energy to Simpson as a student intern. Simpson’s a perennial partner with Cristo Rey’s Corporate Work Study program. It’s designed to get students hands-on experience in the corporate sector, including nonprofits like Simpson.
“In the first year I was learning the basics,” she says. Interns were often organizing donations, sorting mail, putting together informational packets – the relatively simple, hands-on tasks that make office work possible. She progressed from answering phones in her freshman year to handling spreadsheets for Simpson’s HR department in the latter half of her sophomore year.
It’s “experience,” she says – plain and simple.
That can be a huge edge as students transition to the working world. The vast majority of Cristo Rey students are BIPOC or from low-income communities; groups historically underrepresented in corporate America. The work study program helps them both finance their education and bolster their resumes as they prepare for college and beyond. By the time they leave high school, they already have some training, connections, and realistic expectations for what the workplace will be like.
The pandemic changed a lot about the ways Cristo Rey and Simpson could work together. The partnership was put on hiatus in the fall of 2021 because Simpson staff were working remotely in response to the pandemic. When the program resumed in February, Lissette went from working in the office to logging in from home, occasionally competing for bandwidth with the rest of her family. Now that she’s reporting for duty again as a junior, her work is mostly online and project-based: more data and research, fewer clerical tasks.
“Lissette is responsible and self-led,” her supervisor, Employee Relations Business Partner Jennifer Fukuda, says. Those traits are invaluable when it comes to working from home.
Lissette’s advice to other work study participants is to remember to enjoy it. It’s hard to know what to expect, especially when the working world itself is still very much in flux. But opportunities like this aren’t all that common. It’s very “unique,” she says, to Cristo Rey.
Meanwhile, she’s enjoyed having a chance to meet the Simpson staff and get to know what they do. She describes them as “a group of people that are just trying to help out.”
We’re thrilled to have Lissette back and can’t wait to see what she does with her career. She’s not exactly sure what that will be, but she knows college is the next step. The only question is where.