As high school students, finding a balance between schoolwork, sports, and a job is different for everyone—and definitely not an easy task. But for BSM seniors Chris Jones, Sarah Persons, Ali Wahlquist, and Liam Long, this balance comes naturally.

BSM senior Chris Jones, a worker for the City of Wayzata Public Works Department, oversees lawn mowing operations in the summer. Jones, unlike most kids his age, worked 40 hours a week in up to 103-degree weather, every week, for the whole summer. “I like my job because it has good hours and pay, and I get to use some pretty cool machinery, which some of my coworkers don’t exactly know how to use. One time we had to take a truck and pull my coworker out of a swamp because he drove his lawn mower into it. The worst part of my job is dealing with that, and mowing the cemeteries in Wayzata. They’re difficult to mow because you have to maneuver all the gravestones,” Jones said.

It gets more hands on than expected for BSM senior, Sarah Persons, who works as a Kids Academy Supervisor at Lifetime Fitness. Persons is responsible for checking kids in and out of the academy and managing the team members taking care of the kids. She encounters everything from vomit, to screaming kids, to angry parents on a daily basis. “If any problems arise, I solve them. I’ve had to powerwash glitter glue slime off of a play area and windows and it wouldn’t come off. My manager couldn’t get it off either, so we took Snapchats of it instead,” Persons said.

Working at a conjoined Caribou and Bruegger’s in Maple Grove, Ali Wahlquist usually finishes her shifts with dried pumps of caramel and burns from spilled hot coffee on her arms. She knows how to make every drink under the sun, and in a timely fashion. One of the worst parts of Wahlquist’s job is the rush between six in the morning to two in the afternoon. “One time I had to make 16 drinks for one order in like 10 minutes. That was pretty difficult,” Wahlquist said.

Unlike all these other jobs, BSM senior Liam Long works in what many think is a unique field for a teenage job. Long, in charge of people that are five to ten years older than him, is a manager at a scuba diving company, and has the privilege of diving every day. “I love what I do. The only time I didn’t was when I had to scuba dive in a retaining pond, like one of those man-made ponds. There was lots of glass and dangerous stuff in there, it was honestly just gross. I dive in bogs and swamps all the time and it was way grosser than those,” Long said.