Soldotna High launches 1st Job Shadow Day

Soldotna High School students on Wednesday scattered across the central peninsula for the first Job Shadow Day at their school.

At the school that morning, students met their hosts before spending around four hours out in the workforce.

Destini Paxton and Zoey Burns visited Central Peninsula Hospital, the former shadowing an anesthesiologist and the latter an operating room nurse. Both said they observed surgical procedures.

Paxton said she learned what she had hoped to, how the process of the job works — how an anesthesiologist interacts with a patient and then puts them under sedation.

Burns said she learned for certain that she doesn’t want to pursue a career in health care, she’s more interested in marine biology. Still, “it was definitely a good experience, I’d say. I enjoyed it.”

Kiernan Lapp shadowed an ophthalmologist — a surgical eye doctor — from the Kenaitze Indian Tribe. Like Burns, she said the placement didn’t necessarily align with her main career goal of going into the veterinary field, but she reported that she learned and experienced the process of working with patients, scheduling appointments and operating equipment.

“Everyone expects, when you’re going into the medical field, that you’re doing all this cool stuff,” she said. “But paperwork is really a majority of it.”

Also on top of mind for Lapp on Wednesday was the amount of schooling necessary to enter a given career field.

D.K., another Soldotna student, shadowed in the Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor’s Office. There, she said she got to visit a broad swath of the borough’s offices and services, including legal and financial. She said she plans to pursue a political science major, and that she was interested in the details of borough operations including how property taxes are tracked.

“They are really hard-working people,” she said of the borough administration. “They have a lot of things going on at once, but they manage everything very well.”

For decades, a job shadow program like the one debuted in Soldotna this week has been held annually by Kenai Central High School and the Kenai Chamber of Commerce. Leaders from Soldotna High School and the Soldotna Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday that they’ve long wanted to see a similar program in their city.

Job shadowing, Soldotna Chamber Tourism and Education Manager Sara Hondel said, bridges education and local business. It’s a chance for students to “test the waters” and learn what they want to do and what they don’t want to do.

Students participate in job shadow in their junior year, SoHi Counselor Megan Murphy said, part of an effort to help them start thinking about what they need to achieve their career goals. They can tailor their senior year schedules to make sure they’re on the right path to the job they want, and start leveraging the connections they’ve made to gain experience or seek employment.

Many students aren’t sure what they want to do, Murphy said. Job shadow creates a space for them to explore real jobs and real work.

There was immediate interest from the Soldotna community in putting the event on locally, Hondel and Murphy said, but much of the legwork came from seeing what professions students were interested in exploring and making phone calls and connections to try to find the right placements.

Hondel said that she hopes job shadow can be invigorating for the host businesses as well as the students. They get to share their passion for what they do, the history of their work and the paths they took to get there.

Borough Mayor Peter Micciche was the keynote speaker at a luncheon marking the day’s close. Job Shadow Day, he said, is an opportunity for businesses to build relationships with local teenagers that will hopefully lead Soldotna’s students to stay and work in Soldotna.

The businesses in the local area, he said, are eager to talk to young people and eager to help open doors for them. Those relationships and investments matter to the future of this community.

He asked the students gathered how many planned to come back after university, tech school or the military. A small smattering of hands went up.

“That’s what I was worried about.”

“We want you to remember that we really give a damn,” Micciche said. “We want you back. We need you back.”

For more information, find “Soldotna High School” or “Soldotna Chamber of Commerce” on Facebook.

Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.