Internships, Panelists, and Life Skills

Alumni Help Prepare the Next Generation of GCDS Graduates

By Joe Perry, Director of Senior Internship Program and Seminar Teacher

Greenwich Country Day has always prepared its graduates well for their next chapters by providing the tools, experiences, and confidence-building skills necessary to take on the inevitable curveballs that life throws. In keeping with this multigenerational mission, GCDS has established a Senior Internship Program to advise, teach, and provide real-life experiences for Seniors that will open their eyes, inspire their hearts, and expand their minds to prepare them for life after high school.

Our program consists of coursework during the spring semester focused on life-skill activities such as personal finance, understanding a budget, using digital calendars, resume and cover letter writing, social media dos and don’ts, and overall professionalism beyond the classroom. This program prepares Seniors for a month-long internship experience GCDS coordinates for each of the 114 members of the Class of 2023. These internships are created through a partnership between GCDS and a number of different companies, community programs, and other real-world experiences. Joe Perry, the Director of the Senior Internship Program, develops many of these relationships by working closely with the GCDS Alumni Office, Center for Public Good, and the current parent body.

A recent event sponsored by the Alumni Office to support this Upper School program presented a series of Alumni Panels for Grades 11 and 12 called College and Beyond. The panels were themed by three career fields: STEM, Communications, and Finance.

Alumni panelists currently holding careers in these fields spoke to the students about how GCDS prepared them for their journey. The panelists discussed how many of their high school passions and ideas as well as their college majors did not directly support their current careers, but how learning skills such as collaboration, flexibility, research, reading for content, and interdisciplinary thinking has helped them in every experience along the way. They talked about the importance of the process of learning versus the specific content obtained. They also spoke about the specific fields they are currently in and the various options and opportunities these fields hold as well as what information is critical to breaking into each career industry. Developing presentation skills, empathy for others, and a solid work ethic, all of which are pillars of the GCDS education, have given each one of these panelists an advantage over others in their respective fields.

All panelists also stressed the importance of relationships, the wonderfully helpful GCDS alumni community, and how valuable all internship experiences are to help determine a path to pursue—or not to pursue.

Experiences such as our Senior Internship Program are key in helping our graduates transition successfully into life beyond GCDS. We’d like to extend a big thanks to our alumni community and look forward to developing more experiences of Tigers mentoring Tigers.

1 STEM PANEL Alex Quintana ’98, Senior Product Manager, Growth, PagerDuty; Greg Weisbord ’03, Software Engineer, Ripple, a blockchain company; and Katie Dishner ’12, first-year medical student at SUNY Downstate, talked about technology, mathematics, and the medical fields.

2 FINANCE PANEL India Nix ’12, Associate at ICONIQ Capital; Joshua Beaton ’90, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley; Colin Daddino ’04, CIO at family office; Kenny Luse ’01, Portfolio Manager at Point72, a global hedge fund, biotech investor

3 COMMUNICATIONS PANEL Doris “Dottie” Catlin ’89, Executive Director of Career Services, Utah Tech University in St. George, Utah; Mac Bartels ’01, Media & Entertainment Executive; Alicia Del Vecchio O’Malley ’12, Digital Account Manager, MediaMax Network; and Cameron Sterling ’91, Content Strategy Consultant, discussed the broad fields of marketing, entertainment, career services, and more.

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