Community Fellows Blog Posts

Working in the work study department at Cristo Rey High School has been a great learning experience for me. I’ve been doing a variety of different projects from picking up students from their work study placements to organizing data. Sometimes what I do feels like busywork, but once I complete a project I realize that every task contributes to the bigger picture. I spend most of my time formatting spreadsheets and gathering data, and it can be time consuming and frustrating, but all of the assignments I have been given have a purpose and contribute to the program’s necessities. From the start, my supervisor has told me that the program needs someone who can help with organizing and managing their data. After being here for a few months now, I can see what support is needed with data management. There’s only so much I can do in my short time here, but I feel like I’m off to a good start. Clear organization is something we talk about a lot in our classes. I can definitely see that in play at Cristo Rey. It’s difficult to find key pieces of information if all the data is scattered around, and it’s important to centralize the data, and to ask for help when needed.

One of my least favorite things about school, in my opinion, are group projects. This is because sometimes you’ll have partners who just don’t do what they’re supposed to do. At Cristo Rey, however, I quickly had to learn the importance of working in a group. One of my projects is to gather job descriptions for each of the corporate partners (places where the students work). I started this in the Fall and I had recently just finished the project. Getting all of the information really hinged on the knowledge of everyone else on the work study team. I had no clue where the students were working or what they were doing. My supervisor had pointed me to places where I could find some information, but it was fragmented and in so many different places. I had to talk to every single person on the team to get descriptions for almost 100 partners. It was a very time consuming project (spanning the duration of three months, not including Winter Break), but I learned a lot. It’s one thing to talk about these situations in class, and it’s another to actually see it work in the real world. Sometimes it’s difficult to see how what we learn in class can apply to the real world, but we really are learning important life skills.