LYNN — As the school year reaches its final months and graduation looms, the senior class at Lynn English High School is looking toward the future. To help guide them, the school’s career fair, which had not been held since 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, returned Wednesday.
School Counselor Kara Baletsa ran the event, where the 505 students in the senior class were able to learn about 36 different career paths and businesses while interacting with representatives from them.
“We have a lot of kids in the senior class that want to take a gap year. It’s a thing now,” Baletsa said. “But the problem with a gap year is that they’re not doing anything that productive.”
She added that young people who take a gap year tend to push back planning for their future, instead staying at the same job they had in high school or falling out of a scheduled routine.
Baletsa said she doesn’t want students to get stuck in a job that doesn’t offer any growth opportunities, because while they may be making decent money for their current age, it might be hard for that job to sustain them in the future.
“A lot of those kids, (we) just want to show them (they) don’t necessarily have to go to college to get a really good job,” Baletsa said. “We’re trying to give them different options and different pathways.”
The only vendor present that requires employees to have a college degree was HMFH Architects.
“The reason why I invited them was because a lot of our kids don’t know what architects are. Like, they don’t even know that it’s a job,” Baletsa said. “For the most part every (vendor) here is a school (or business) that’s going to train you for a trade (or has) on-the-job training.”
Baletsa said that in last year’s graduating class, around 21% of graduates planned to attend a four-year educational institution, 23% of graduates planned to attend a two-year educational institution, and a small percentage of graduates joined the military.
“We can’t have half a senior class graduating with no plan or no direction,” Baletsa said.
Senior Joselyn Armas has a plan to go into data analysis, but was eager to see what else is out there.
“I learned there’s more opportunities than what I knew. Like, there’s jobs in Lynn where you can work in an office and get real hands-on experience,” Armas said about the career fair.
Out of the 36 vendors present, eight of them were from Lynn: Girls Inc., Lynn District Court, the Police Department, the Fire Department, the City of Lynn, MassHire, Lynn Youth Career Center, and Gregg House: Early Education.
In the coming years, Baletsa said she hopes to expand the fair and bring in more vendors, including construction workers, morticians, and aestheticians.
“You don’t have to go to school, you can have a really great life and not go to school,” Baletsa said.
