By JEN COWART
Special to the Herald
Editor’s note: This story is part of an occasional series highlighting senior interns in Cranston Public Schools.
Jeremy Peña-Salazar is a senior this year in the Culinary Arts program at the Cranston Area Career and Technical Center.
During the summer prior to his senior year, he applied for and was accepted into the PrepareRI Internship program for rising seniors. Students in the program take part in a paid internship job over the summer leading up to their senior year.
“My girlfriend told me about the program and what a big opportunity it was to get a summer job and to learn a lot,” he said. “She was right. I truly did learn a lot from it.”
After applying, Peña-Salazar was offered the opportunity to interview in a group setting at school. He then he had a one-on-one interview at Rhode Island College before being accepted as an intern.
“They ask you for your focus area, and I told them that I want to become a chef,” he said. “So they put me in a culinary internship at Avvio in Garden City.”
Although the schedule may sound grueling for some students who appreciate the break in the summertime, Peña-Salazar said that the seven- and eight-hour workdays were the best thing in his life.
“Some people say a job isn’t supposed to be fun, but I enjoyed all the new faces and the atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone was so nice and so polite. Even though I was younger than most of them, they treated me like a friend, like family.”
Because of the program, Peña-Salazar now has the opportunity to apply for a scholarship to Johnson & Wales University, and he feels that the internship solidified his future career ambitions.
“I want to continue on the path to becoming a chef,” he said. “I want to own my own restaurant in the future. I’m willing to invest so that I can be like Gordon Ramsey. I have been cooking with my grandmother for a long time even before I started in the culinary program.”
Peña-Salazar hopes to be able to return to Avvio outside of the internship, and he looks forward to getting back into the energizing routines he enjoyed over the summer.
“People say that jobs are tiring, but to me, I’m a workaholic and not as much a school person,” he said. “I love working in culinary because it’s what I like to do. I enjoyed the fast pace.”
Peña-Salazar also honed his communications strengths during his internship.
“During the program they gave us our strengths and asked us to practice and balance areas where we weren’t as strong with those places where we were strong. I am a communicative person,” he said. “Interpersonal skills are one of my top strengths. I am a self-led person and I like to help others.”
He also was able to put the culinary skills he’d been taught in his program at CACTC into action out in the real world of work.
“I was able to use my knife skills and my cooking skills,” he said. “They made me cook on the woodfire grill, and the heat that emits from that is so strong and there’s no AC, and yet there I was happy. I really do enjoy it.”
Peña-Salazar is thankful for the opportunities he was given this past summer and looks forward to seeing where they will take him in the future.
“I know that this experience will help me in the future,” he said. “I want to go to Johnson & Wales for culinary as my education goal, and I hope to go back to work at Avvio again.”
For more information about the PrepareRI internship program, visit prepare-ri.org/internships. To learn more about the CACTC Culinary Arts program, visit cpsed.net/cactc. 1