SAN ANTONIO – Transitioning from high school to college or the workforce can be daunting for many students. For the past seven years, CAST Tech High School’s mentorship program has aimed to ease this transition, providing students with valuable guidance from experienced professionals.
Jennifer Solis, an operations manager at Accenture in San Antonio, is one of the program’s dedicated mentors. Reflecting on her high school experience, Solis recalled feeling unprepared for the shift from student life to the professional world. This gap in readiness motivated her to give back as a mentor.
“When I heard about it, I was super interested,” Solis said. “I really wanted to go off of my own high school experience and how I was not so prepared to enter the adult world, and I really just wanted to give back and try to help them.”
Through the mentorship program, Solis was paired with Madison Garcia, a freshman at CAST Tech High School at the time. Garcia, now a junior, said she is grateful for the preparation and support she received.
“I was super amazed by how prepared (Solis) was,” Garcia said. “It helped me a lot along the way, and I’m really appreciative of that.”
The mentorship program is designed to introduce students to the workforce with practical skills like resume-building. Solis emphasized the importance of showcasing the skills students acquire in high school.
“One thing that was really important to me was to show them how to take the classes and courses they’re doing here and be able to put that on their resume as skills they have,” Solis said. “Just because you don’t have job experience doesn’t mean you don’t have the skills to do the job.”
Garcia said Solis “helped me a lot with my resume. “I did not know one single thing about making a resume, and she made everything super simple. It felt refreshing to know that I had a good place to start off my year.”
Solis recently learned that Garcia’s newly crafted resume helped her secure a job at H-E-B, where her application impressed the employer. Garcia’s success story highlights the benefits of the mentorship program.
As CAST Tech High School looks to the future, they hope to recruit more mentors to meet the growing demand.
Watch our KSAT Community Town Hall on why mentorship matters this Thursday at 2 p.m. on KSAT.com, KSAT Plus or anywhere you stream. More details here.
