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WorkSmart Program helps Malden High students with future decisions

Malden YWCA staff helps students envision a path for their future

By Beatriz Oliveira

Malden High

Blue and Gold

High School is the last step before students begin making life-changing decisions as fresh young adults. A process like this can be stressful, which is why the local Malden YWCA began collaboration with Malden High School to create the WorkSmart program.

WorkSmart allows for juniors and seniors to have an opportunity to explore their career identity. In their weekly meetings, WorkSmart’s manager, Cassandra LeBrun, prepares workshops that help members connect deeper with themselves to what they hope to achieve in the future. “The main mission for WorkSmart is to help students to actually understand who they are so that they can get to a place of loving what they want to do and have longevity in their careers, and even in college,” LeBrun said.

Before working at the YWCA, LeBrun worked as Assistant Director of Recruitment and Employer Engagement at Northeastern University. Even though LeBrun enjoyed her work at Northeastern, she slowly realized that she preferred working one-on-one with students. “[I am] very community oriented and driven” and because of that, “this role had the best of both worlds,” where she still got to connect with employees as well as students.

LeBrun manages the program and Malden High Guidance Counselor Kristy Magras also helps coordinate and recruit eligible students to participate. For the past three years, Magras has been connecting with students and helping them build skills “beyond the classroom,” which “helps them be successful in life.”

“I think that Malden High School is great at getting our students through high school and into college, but there’s a piece of that about, ‘what do we do after we graduate?’” said Magras.

So far, the WorkSmart program has provided many students with internship and volunteer opportunities. For example, senior Leica Naceus wants to go into the medical industry when she graduates, and with this program she was introduced to a Winchester Hospital program. “I get to work at a hospital, work with patients, bring things to doctors and everything and that actual connection building between me and Winchester is 100 percent going to be beneficial later on in my life and much more,” explained Naceus.

To provide such wonderful opportunities, WorkSmart has tight funding in collaboration with MassHire, meaning that to apply there’s a specific criteria you need to fit. Magras said she hopes that students “utilize every opportunity that’s given to them, because it’s a program that is only offered to a select group of students. Again, these are things that would be beneficial to all students, but based on the grant funding, we can only approve a barrier.”

Although WorkSmart focuses on building your individual career identity, many students as well as staff learn valuable lessons in their time. “I learned that you should start thinking about your future even if you’re not totally sure about what you want to do … simply writing it out or thinking about it helps … to prepare you even better,” mentioned junior Keira Celicourt.

“I learned so much from them, and they make me so proud, because I think they also taught me to go for it as well. Just even at my age, seeing them, that’s exactly how I was,” emphasized LeBrun.

“I was doing all those things, but seeing them now, do those things now, and how they show up for themselves in these workshops, I’m just like, ‘wow,’” she continued.