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600 Boston teens start summer jobs

E-mail|Link|Comments () July 8, 2009 01:08 PM

By Matt Collette, Globe Correspondent

For his first summer job, the police commissioner did data entry. Boston University's president loaded groceries from a boxcar into a warehouse. And the mayor cleaned sooty furnaces.

"When I got home from work every day, my mother wouldn't even let me in the house," said Mayor Thomas M. Menino of his first high school job in Hyde Park.

Some 600 Boston teens got jobs this summer through the MLK Summer Scholars program and they will be working for some of the city's top institutions instead. This morning in the George Sherman Union at Boston University, civic and business leaders wished Boston students luck as they began working for John Hancock, The Boston Globe, and about 80 other community businesses.

Summer jobs "teach us about work, they teach us about ourselves," said Robert Brown, president of Boston University, to a group of about 200 students. "They teach about what you want to do, and they show you what it is you don't want to do. I can tell you that from personal experience."

The program, paid for with more than $1 million from John Hancock Financial Services and supported by the Globe, BU, and Partners HealthCare, is named after Martin Luther King, Jr., who earned his doctorate at BU.

Rhonda Edwards, an 18-year-old graduate of the John D. O'Bryant School of Math and Science headed to St. Francis College in New York this fall, said the program helped her develop skills that have made her successful.

"I realized that being shy doesn't get you anywhere when you need to get something done," Edwards said.

She has high aspirations, something she credits to the experience she gained at the Institute of Contemporary Art the past two summers.

"When I grow up, I'm going to be a senator," Edwards said. "And not because of the publicity or the paycheck, but because I'm down for the cause."