RL@Work

Launched in 2017, the RL@Work program provides boys at the end of their Class II year with an off-campus experience of discovery and growth—through visits to places of work, encounters with professionals, facilitated group discussions, individual reflection, and engagement in hands-on design challenges and case studies. Consistent with the school’s mission—“to prepare students intellectually, morally and spiritually for service in the world as leaders of integrity and conviction,”—we want to help boys imagine how they might “lead and serve” in the years ahead. By exposing students to various professions and types of leadership—challenging them to solve real-world problems and discuss current topics—we aim to prepare them for citizenship, service, work, and the world.

Over four days, Class II boys and faculty chaperones are hosted in and around Boston and Cambridge by more than forty generous alumni, parents, former RL parents, and friends of the school—entrepreneurs and investors, doctors and engineers, lawyers and judges, developers and designers, researchers and economists, professors and business owners—who take time out of their busy professional lives to share their passions with juniors during the final days of the school year.

In recent years, boys have had the opportunities to:

• Learn from innovators—solving big problems—at the MIT Media Lab
• Practice intubation and laparoscopic surgery skills at Brigham and Women’s STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation
• Build and donate bicycles through the Bikes Not Bombs organization
• Pitch a product and “invest” wisely, through a Shark Tank-like competition game
• Meet with attorneys representing the Suffolk County D.A.’s office
• Scrub into an open heart surgery, and hold a human gallbladder alongside surgeons
• Operate a backhoe and learn about development and construction at Consigli Construction
• Visit Fenway Park to hear from members of the organization’s leadership (and catch a game!)