Last Friday, Cristo Rey High School hosted it’s annual career day for its sophomore class. Career day provides students with an opportunity to connect with and listen to local business leaders share their stories about various industries, including finance, law, healthcare, and entrepreneurship.
Cristo Rey, started in 1997 and located in the Pilsen/Little Village community of Chicago, provides a college preparatory education to students where other private school are not a financial option. Cristo Rey utilizes a Corporate Work Study Program where each student works at least 5 days a month at corporations around the Chicagoland area performing entry level work. Being active in the Chicago start-up community, its great to hear success stories of start-ups – I would add Cristo Rey to that list. 18 years ago, they were a start-up with a different business model than other high schools and most importantly, provided the best education to bright students so that these students could achieve their goals in life.
The morning started out with a speaker, Juan Moreno, an entrepreneur himself, founder and president of JGMA (www.jgma.co), an architect firm in Chicago. Our blog post could not paint a better picture than the presentation he gave the students Friday morning – what an amazing story. Here is a leader and visionary who after years of experience working for other architect firms, he decided to create his own to follow his passion of helping the education industry. I encourage you to check out his site to see the work his firm has completed – he definitely has an eye for design. Nearing the end of his presentation, he made a statement based starting his own firm – “after getting used to receiving two paychecks every two weeks working for someone, its definitely a different experience when you start your own firm and not having those paychecks come in every month, but looking back, it was definitely worth the risk.”
Following Juan’s presentation, the students broke off into different workshops. I was one of the speakers in the entrepreneur class where the four students sat at a table and each of the speakers spent a couple minutes at each table talking about their business. The speakers answered the students questions, then moved onto another table. After speaking to over 50 students, I was amazed to listen to their business ideas and plans to start a business after college. I heard stories from starting a photography business to being a fashion designer. These kids had energy and were ready to start their busy yesterday. It was great to see the ambition and creativity in the classroom.
If you like to get involved and be part of the Cristo Rey community, please contact us or visit their website at www.CristoRey.net.