Like many other PALCS students, Nick Fritz has a lot on his plate. In addition to schoolwork, Fritz, a senior, plays two sports and works up to eight hours a day in construction.
A typical day for Fritz starts when he wakes up at 5 a.m. so he can get to a construction site by 6:30 a.m. He’ll work until 2:30 p.m. (right now he’s putting up framing for a hotel), then head off to whatever’s next.
For Fritz, “what’s next” is sometimes jumping right into to online schoolwork through PALCS. Other times, Fritz has practice or a game before he completes his schoolwork.
He started playing hockey when he was four years old, and this year his Northern Berks team won the Viola Cup, the championship trophy for the Central Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League.
The ability to try new things
The flexibility PALCS provides means Fritz can try new things, without a rigid schedule of back-to-back classes taking up his mornings and early afternoons.
When he was a sophomore at PALCS, Fritz took up golf, a sport that proved to be a change from the rough-and-tumble action of hockey.
“When I would play [golf] before, I’d get super angry and drag the whole mood down,” Fritz said on Winging It, the official PACS podcast. “I would get super angry and stressed and worried. I’d have one bad hole and fall apart. So this year I’m trying not to do that.”
Figuring out career goals
The mental growth Fritz has seen is coming not only from sports. He’s recently started a job in construction that he wants to turn into a career. That realization didn’t come right away. Fritz initially considered going to a four-year university.
“I would go on college visits and I was kind of forcing myself to think I couldn’t do [construction] as a career. I had never done it before. I was forcing myself to like the college visit, to think ‘I like it here. This is what I want to do, I want to go to college.’ But I didn’t want to go to college at all,” Fritz said.
Fritz says his future plans now involve joining the carpenter’s union, which involves many hours of training over the course of a few years.
Hear more about how Nick Fritz discovered what he likes to do, and how he balances it all with online schoolwork, on the Winging It podcast.
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