Tyler Parenteau was quite open in his Grade 12 exit interview with BCSS career councillor Pam Storie.
“I don’t have a goal,” he admitted. “I am just going with the flow kind of thing. I just want to have a year or two break before going on to school, because I have been going to school for over 12 years. I need a break.”
He worked last year for the Boundary Invasive Species Society. “I loved that job, it was awesome. You got to go outside and pick weeds, it was fun and I got paid more than minimum wage which was good too.”
He’s hoping to get back on that job again this summer.
In his final year at BCSS he is taking Fire Suppression 12, a course that gives students valuable certificates that can open up a lot of doors with future employers.
“I have changed my mind about what I wanted to be so many times. I wanted to be a mechanic, a physicist, a chemist—practically everything.”
Tyler said he’d worked picking pine cones at Hansinger tree farm for a month, another outside job. “I don’t see myself sitting at a desk,” he admitted.
“Long-term I am going to have to figure out what I am going to do soon. I have to think of the future, but right now I am just thinking of the present and don’t really know where it is going to take me.”
For his quotation he picked one that he said his dad often says: “Be the change you want to be.” That’s all very well—“But I am just a lowly teenager at the moment,” says Tyler with a laugh.