YouthWorks at Johns Hopkins University

Summer Jobs Welcom 250 Local Youth; Students Exposed to Various Career Paths

July 20, 2009
By Amy Lunday
Homewood
Approximately 250 young Baltimoreans are in their fourth week of employment on the Homewood and East Baltimore campuses through Johns Hopkins Institutions’ partnership with the city’s YouthWorks Summer Jobs Campaign.

The six-week program, administered by Baltimore’s Office of Employment Development, is designed to get local youth, ages 14 to 21, working and earning money during the summer, exposing them to a variety of public- and private-sector work settings and helping them prepare for future careers.

The local youth—150 of them at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, about 20 at Bayview Medical Center and 100 at Homewood and other university sites—are working in a variety of departments. Their positions range from administrative and clerical work to assisting faculty and staff with their clinical responsibilities, research studies and technical support duties. The students work from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to noon on Fridays; on Friday afternoons, all 250 gather in Shriver Hall at Homewood or Turner Hall in East Baltimore to hear guest speakers talk about such topics as how to achieve business success and professionalism and how to be good money managers.

At a kick-off event for the YouthWorks program earlier this year, JHU President Ronald J. Daniels called the university’s involvement “a terrific illustration of how the city and Baltimore’s private employers can work together to address an urgent public need.” Daniels said he was proud that Johns Hopkins answered the call to expand the summer jobs program in the midst of a very serious national recession.

“A summer job is something more than a teenager’s rite of passage,” Daniels said. “It represents that important first entree into the world of work, the promise of career and the opportunity to discover one’s passion. It’s a ticket to new places, new challenges and personal growth.”

Yariela Kerr-Donovan, director of Project REACH/Community Education Projects for the Johns Hopkins Health System, helps administer the YouthWorks program at Johns Hopkins.

“What we’re trying to do is to expose young people to the world of work and the health-care industry,” Kerr-Donovan said. “We hope they’ll be inspired to pursue post-secondary education in health care or pursue a career in this industry that has upward mobility and growth.”

GCPA's YouthWorks participants. From left Alex Peters, Kenterra Fisher, Chanel Pierce, Samone Ijoma and Zach Worsley

In the Office of Government, Community and Public Affairs in Fells Point, five teens have been performing a variety of tasks, from stuffing envelopes to assisting with video shoots. They’ve also been learning firsthand about GCPA’s mission of communicating the messages of Johns Hopkins by blogging about their experiences at the divisions they’ve visited and the people they’ve met along the way. 

“It’s not what I thought I’d be doing,” said Chanel Pierce, a senior at the Institute of Business and Entrepreneurship High School. “I thought I’d be doing a lot of filing, not working on big projects and taking field trips. It’s the most thinking I’ve ever done during the summer, but I like it.”

Pierce and her co-workers also went behind the scenes to help out at a press conference organized by GCPA and hosted at the School of Education, featuring President Daniels and U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland. The event was held to promote a new federal loan program that allows individuals who choose to work in public service for 10 years to reduce or eliminate their qualifying loan and debt.

“My favorite part was the press conference—I’d never been a part of anything like that before,” said Samone Ijoma, a junior at Roland Park Country School. “It was really interesting to see all the news people there with their cameras.”

According to Baltimore City officials, the goal this year was to be able to offer jobs to 7,000 young people, an increase of more than 20 percent from last year. Everyone who applied for a summer job and met the criteria was offered one, they said.

The students weren’t the only ones to benefit from the program, according to Kerr-Donovan. “With the state challenged by a high unemployment rate and most Hopkins departments dealing with a hiring freeze, the six-week program presents a win-win situation for the institution, community, young people and their families,” she said.

A closing ceremony for YouthWorks at Johns Hopkins is planned from 1 to 3:30 p.m. on Friday, July 31, in Turner Auditorium.

Inside and outside of school, I am heavily involved in the arts, especially dance. Because of my love for various art forms, I was excited to tour the Peabody Institute with my YouthWorks group. Peabody is a well known conservatory and preparatory school located in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. When we arrived there for our tour recently, we were met by our tour guide, Richard Selden, director of marketing and communications at Peabody, and Paul Espinosa, library assistant at Peabody. We first walked into a room with high ceilings, a large painting of George Peabody and rare books in display cases. From there, we entered the actual library – home of the Cathedral of Books, which has more than 300,000 volumes and six ornate floors. I was shocked at the number of floors and volumes of books in the library. I love to read and I had never been around so many books before. Unfortunately, the library assistant told us that none of the books could be checked out and that no one besides him could even take books off the shelves. This is to prevent the mishandling of the old books and further preserve their worn covers and pages. The architecture of Peabody’s library is spectacular. The railings and balconies in the Cathedral are constructed of cast iron to prevent catastrophic damage in the event of a fire. Besides the Cathedral, we also saw Friedberg Hall, three different concert halls, dance studios, and music practice rooms where kids who are there for the summer, were participating in various programs. For me, the best part of our trip to Peabody was watching the young dancers in their beginner’s class and observing the art history of Peabody. Overall, this visit was great for me because I plan to audition and registrar for Peabody’s Dance program in the fall.

Delora Sanchez, assistant director of state affairs, and one of our mentors.

I’ve made it through the first weeks of my summer job. Overall, it’s been fun.  One of the highlights of being at GCPA is the time we get to spend with Delora Sanchez, an attorney and assistant director of state affairs at GCPA.  She’s been talking to us about college and preparing ourselves to be able to defend our opinions.  She told us that law school “was no joke,” and that the bar exam was hard and time consuming – three days. As I listened to her, I imagined myself  attending college and law school and then studying for the bar.

We’ve lived in Baltimore all of our lives but have never stepped foot on the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus – until a few weeks ago. The buildings are beautiful and the grounds are very pretty and well-maintained. Our two tour guides (shown here) who are students here, showed us a few of the classroom buildings such as the Whiting School of Engineering. (They’re really good at walking backyards). We saw Garland Hall, which houses university President Ronald J. Daniels’ office, and Mason Hall, the main admissions building. We also saw the Milton S. Einsenhower Library and Gilman Hall, the university’s flagship building whose historic interior and exterior is nearing the end of a massive renovatiion.  As Alex Peters, a junior honors student at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, said after the tour, “I wouldn’t mind going to Johns Hopkins.”