The Career Pathway Program at St. Joan Antida allows young women to explore their potential in career fields that are growing. (Submitted photo)
Few high school sophomores get the chance to experience a school program that gives them real world experience and empowers the discernment of where God may want to lead their career.
St. Joan Antida High School sophomore Jada Swan has already experienced that through her school’s Career Pathway Program, an optional academics-and-more opportunity. It is designed to offer students an experience-based education to grow and understand the journey they’re called to take.
“With Introduction to Business, I had created my own business called The Eventful Estate. It was very complex, but I liked it because it helped me think of the structure of business, and it helped me get more involved,” Swan said.
“It has helped me to see that I’m not very interested in the health care field but more interested in business.”
Career Pathway also is designed to help students gain lifelong skills in applied knowledge, critical thinking, communication and cross-cultural engagement.
“We’re always looking for opportunities to stay relevant in, or to keep our students relevant in, the marketplace,” adds René Howard-Páez, President of St. Joan Antida High School, an all-girls school located in downtown Milwaukee.
“This part of going to school is so that they can get the tools to be able to go to any career that they want. The Pathway Program was built out of a foundation in hopes to be able to expose them to different careers early on in an affordable way, so that it wouldn’t be a challenge. The program exists really for the young ladies to be able to explore these experiences ahead of time.”
He said that the recently instituted program came from a partnership the school built with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce to zero in on future higher-demand fields and skills.
“We came up with health care, business and then engineering and information technology,” he said. “Last year, we just added an art and design pathway that’s still being built upon, and then with that, we had an internship program for the first time.”
Students in the entrepreneurship track encounter real world experience, from the initial presentation of a business plan to seeing it through.
“They’re doing like a ‘Shark Tank’-type pitch to these funders to create the whole renovation project of the school’s concession stand,” said Melanie Berexa, Director of Advancement.
“They’ve got three different groups and had businesses come in and talk to them about how to give a pitch, how a construction project works from beginning to end. Then at the end of October, the funders will come in and listen to these pitches and pick the best business plan to move forward with.”
St. Joan’s alumna Zamarah Martinez-Santa Anna, now a psychology student at Carroll University in Waukesha, not only took part in that program in 2024-25 but experienced how businesses can adjust, pivot and change to bring better profitability.
“I partook in the internship for the Spot Cafe that was offered at St. Joan. It was very new, and we really had to start from the ground up, building how we’re going to market the cafe and how we’re going to take stock and inventory,” Martinez-Santa Anna said.
“Then we ended up changing the plans midway, mid-year, and we moved to doing smoothies. It worked for the better.”
Others like Swan are getting to explore a link between business skills with technology and science careers through robotics.
“RoboChix is our robotics club. Right now, our challenge is for our robot to throw balls in the machine and get the code right. I’m a part of the fundraising team,” said Swan. “Right now, we’re trying to get money to pursue robots and outreaching to other middle schoolers.”
Howard-Páez says that these experiences are helping St. Joan Antida expand the paths students can take by not just solely encouraging the chase for four-year college degrees.
“We encourage young ladies to either pursue four-year school, two-year school, trades, entrepreneurship. We don’t restrict them to just one kind of opportunity.”
Howard-Páez sees that while it builds partnerships with companies throughout Milwaukee, one of the next logical steps to enhance their program involves arming young women with both professional credentials and scholarship money before they leave the walls of St. Joan Antida.
“We’d like to have some kind of learning certificates attached to it so that they can show, ‘Hey, I accomplished this skill set for this pathway. I hit this benchmark. I can put it on my resume. I can put it on my LinkedIn.’ It becomes a talking point in interviews,” he said.
“I also am going to be leaning on our university partners, both higher ed four-year and two-year institutions like MATC, to see what kind of specific scholarships or partnerships that we could attach to this as well. Part of our dream is to say there’s a scholarship for each pathway that one of our students has access to.”
That access has empowered alumnae like Martinez-Santa Anna to understand that it’s OK to change direction and see where God is leading her.
“I just kind of take it as wherever God wants me to be, that’s where I’ll be, then that’s where I’ll take it with me,” she said. “If it’s not the right opportunity now, if it comes up again, then that’s where I’ll be. But it’s just up to the ‘Big Man.’”
