Some Boyden-Hull High School juniors and seniors spend part of the school day as “associates” rather than students. They dress sharply, in business attire, and they learn the skills that will one day serve them in the workplace.
“They dress up every single day,” Alex Frick said. “It’s nonnegotiable.”
Along with teaching high school business courses, Frick is the adviser to the Center for Advanced Professional Studies program, or CAPS program. Students who enroll in the program meet for two periods each afternoon at Farmers Mutual Insurance in Hull. They learn professional skills, like how to behave in a workplace or successfully manage a group, and they partner with local businesses and organizations to work on projects with real-world implications.
“It’s soft skills, but it’s professional skills. You’re looking at things like, ‘Can you manage a group? Can you provide value in a group?’ And understanding what’s acceptable in the workplace and what’s not acceptable in the workplace,” Frick said. “We call the students ‘associates’ because we want to get away from that mindset of being a student — ‘You’re not a student right now.’”
Students adjust to other semantic shifts, too, after they leave their regular classrooms and enter CAPS time. Along with addressing students as “associates,” Frick said he has his students call him by his first name during the two periods they devote to the program each afternoon.
“I have them call me by my first name because I might be someone who is giving them guidance, but I don’t want to be your teacher. I don’t want to hand everything to you,” Frick said. “I think they appreciate being treated like adults.”
Senior Dennie Boogerd is participating in CAPS this semester, and she said calling her teacher by his first name took a little getting used to.
“I would say it’s pretty weird calling my teacher by his first name,” the 18-year-old Boogerd said. “I’m still not used to it.”
She often catches herself saying “Mr. Frick” before she remembers — during CAPS, it’s “Alex.”
Onboarding
At Boyden-Hull High School, the semesterlong CAPS program begins with six weeks of onboarding.
“The process is all about trying to introduce and really hammer home your professional skills,” Frick said.
Early in the program, students take personality tests, which can help illuminate students’ leadership or communication styles or suggest how they work best in a group.
“We have a lot of different trainings and activities that we do to kind of build that setting — so that they’re more comfortable walking into somewhere, shaking someone’s hand, talking to somebody, but it also teaches them how to be active and engaged in an industry environment instead of a classroom,” Frick said.
During the six weeks of onboarding, Boyden-Hull High School students attended training and networking events alongside students from two other high schools, Central Lyon High School and Sibley-Ocheyedan High School, which are members of Boyden-Hull’s regional CAPS cohort.
Client projects
After the onboarding process is complete, students are organized into teams of two to four, and each team partners with a different participating business or organization in Hull or the surrounding area to complete a project on the community partner’s behalf.
“The students end up reaching out, and they host client meetings,” Frick said. “They meet with their business partner, their client, at least every two weeks, and they work on a project for the client.”
Last year, one group of students partnered with American State Bank in Hull to develop a social media marketing campaign to reach Hispanic clients in the community.
“They’re trying to find different ideas for how they can reach more of a changing demographic,” Frick said.
Other past projects have been undertaken in partnership with businesses big and small, and last year, one client project included a partnership between a CAPS team and Sara Friedrichsen, who owns Aftermath Creations, a small business based in Hull that sells home furnishings created with reclaimed or upcycled wood.
Frick is only in his second year as adviser to the CAPS program, but he said this semester’s client projects are some of the best yet. He has 10 students in the program this semester, a jump from previous semesters.
“One group is working with Hull First Reformed Church, and they’re working on promotion of a new contemporary service called The Well,” Frick said. “A second group is working with Brynn Makenna Photography.”
The Rock Valley-based photography business is owned by Brynn Van Voorst, who recently opened a brick-and-mortar photography studio and event space, Everyday Studio & Space, in downtown Rock Valley.
Boogerd is one of two students partnering with Makenna to organize and market social events at the new venue in Hull, which can be rented for public and private events.
“We’ve mainly been coming up with the ideas and then we’ve been kind of doodling with different marketing posts we could use,” Boogerd said.
The project is still in its early stages, but Boogerd and her teammate meet regularly with Van Voorst to discuss the project and make plans, and the two associates were on hand for the business’ grand opening last week.
Career discovery
Students get hands-on experience in the business world during their CAPS experience, but the final component of the CAPS experience may be the most formative one, according to Frick.
“There’s a lot of career exploration that happens within CAPS,” Frick said. “We require them to do a lot of background research on three different careers, and then they have to go and perform what we call three ‘career explorations’ or ‘career discoveries.’ So, they need to basically interview three different people in different careers, whether that be over the phone, over Zoom — but we encourage them to meet in person.”
When students meet with area professionals face to face, they are required to take a selfie with the person to create a record of the meeting.
Frick said the opportunity to explore different careers as a high school student can be clarifying for students moving toward graduation. He remembers a student from last year who was on the fence about attending college. The student was enrolled in an accounting class he enjoyed, and he thought the profession might be a good fit for him. However, after interviewing a local accountant for one of his career discovery assignments, he realized that was not the direction he wanted to go.
“Accounting wasn’t it, but he enjoyed his anatomy class, too,” Frick said.
The student interviewed Samantha Moss, a physician assistant who practices with the Orange City Area Health System.
“He job shadowed after that because he enjoyed it, and he ended up going to the University of Iowa for PA school,” Frick said.
Boogerd said career discovery is her favorite part of CAPS, too. She is interested in the fields of interior design and graphic design, so she arranged to interview Kristen Mellema, who owns Align Creative Design Co., an interior design business in Orange City.
“I really like how the CAPS program encourages you to go talk to other people — that has really been beneficial to me, to talk to people in a career that I am looking toward,” Boogerd said.
“I’m going to talk to someone in graphic design as well,” she added. “ I just really like how CAPS gets you to go out and discover more.”
