We are so lucky to have her.
She was a rising star in her hometown of Toronto in 2018 to the point that when Ron MacLean was unavailable for Coach's Corner during the Olympics CBC/Sportsnet chose her.
She loves her life in Boston and is content with the compensation she gets from NESN.
www.bostonglobe.com
The morning it all began to go sideways for Jurksztowicz started with a stop at the Coffee Tree around the corner from home. It was her mother’s request. Sophia knew something wasn’t right.
“Polish immigrants don’t go out for coffee,” recalled Jurksztowicz, thinking back to the fall of her senior year. “You have coffee at home, so you don’t need to go pay for it. I was freaked out, thinking, like, ‘Why the hell is Mom taking me out for coffee?’ ”
A highly motivated student with solid grades at Bishop Allen Academy, Jurksztowicz was in the thick of applying to Ryerson University in Toronto. Most of her pals were applying at other Toronto schools or elsewhere in Canada.
“ ‘I know you are applying for universities … I know you are very career-driven … and you want to do well … all your friends are going and you want to be in the same place and time with them,’ ” Jurksztowicz said, recalling her mother’s words that morning, “ ‘but your father and I think you shouldn’t go to school for a few years.’ ”
A typical teenager, Jurksztowicz responded, “Uhhh … what?!”
Mom and Dad, said Jurksztowicz, firmly believed life was a better teacher at that stage and school could wait. She already was fluent in Polish. When she was 10, her parents had put her alone on a flight to Poland to spend the summer with relatives and immerse further in the language.
“That was something,” she recalled. “Get off a plane, age 10, and look for someone you don’t know, holding your name on a card.”
So go back to Europe, her mother told her that day at the coffee shop, and become fluent in another language. Go to France. Go to Italy. Go wherever you like for at least two years and then think about school.
Really, two years? It was presented as nonnegotiable. But Jurksztowicz, in a bit of crisis negotiation, talked her mother and father down to a year.
Just weeks after high school graduation, she was on her way to France, hired by a couple in Saint-Tropez to be a live-in nanny for their 2-year-old son.
“They wanted Noé out of the house all day on Sundays, mainly so they could recover from their parties the night before,” noted Jurksztowicz. “Saint-Tropez is yacht-friendly, but really not so kid-friendly, not a lot of parks and such. It was hard to find things to do on a Sunday morning.”
The local Catholic church provided safe harbor and respite for an hour or two each Sunday. Jurksztowicz and Noé would sit in the pew for Mass, the boy transfixed by the choir and the music. It really resonated with him. Jurksztowicz returned recently and found out that Noé, now 20, often plays the organ for services in that same Saint-Tropez church.
In only a matter of weeks, Jurksztowicz said, she was fluent in her new language, to the point of dreaming in it. By the following fall, slightly less than a year later, she was back home in Toronto, enrolled at Ryerson, where she earned her degree in the school of radio and TV arts.
Roughly a dozen years after returning from France, and after myriad broadcast jobs that included a brief run appearing on the real “Hockey Night in Canada,” she landed here in Boston with NESN.
She heads out the door each day for work delighted to fulfill a dream she began to conjure while watching Leafs games on Saturday night propped on her father’s lap.
“Mom and Dad were right — our life doesn’t start and end, necessarily, with high school if you don’t get into where you want to go and all that,” Jurksztowicz said, recounting the message long ago imparted by Zenon and Anna. “They trusted I’d come back and apply myself, but with a whole different perspective on how I wanted to do things, what I wanted to do.”
School’s out and life is just beginning for so many kids. The journey, even sometimes with its unexpected turns, is what makes the destination.
She was a rising star in her hometown of Toronto in 2018 to the point that when Ron MacLean was unavailable for Coach's Corner during the Olympics CBC/Sportsnet chose her.
She loves her life in Boston and is content with the compensation she gets from NESN.
NESN’s Sophia Jurksztowicz on why it’s OK if your dreams take a little time - The Boston Globe
The journey, even sometimes with its unexpected turns, is what makes the destination.
www.bostonglobe.com
The morning it all began to go sideways for Jurksztowicz started with a stop at the Coffee Tree around the corner from home. It was her mother’s request. Sophia knew something wasn’t right.
“Polish immigrants don’t go out for coffee,” recalled Jurksztowicz, thinking back to the fall of her senior year. “You have coffee at home, so you don’t need to go pay for it. I was freaked out, thinking, like, ‘Why the hell is Mom taking me out for coffee?’ ”
A highly motivated student with solid grades at Bishop Allen Academy, Jurksztowicz was in the thick of applying to Ryerson University in Toronto. Most of her pals were applying at other Toronto schools or elsewhere in Canada.
“ ‘I know you are applying for universities … I know you are very career-driven … and you want to do well … all your friends are going and you want to be in the same place and time with them,’ ” Jurksztowicz said, recalling her mother’s words that morning, “ ‘but your father and I think you shouldn’t go to school for a few years.’ ”
A typical teenager, Jurksztowicz responded, “Uhhh … what?!”
Mom and Dad, said Jurksztowicz, firmly believed life was a better teacher at that stage and school could wait. She already was fluent in Polish. When she was 10, her parents had put her alone on a flight to Poland to spend the summer with relatives and immerse further in the language.
“That was something,” she recalled. “Get off a plane, age 10, and look for someone you don’t know, holding your name on a card.”
So go back to Europe, her mother told her that day at the coffee shop, and become fluent in another language. Go to France. Go to Italy. Go wherever you like for at least two years and then think about school.
Really, two years? It was presented as nonnegotiable. But Jurksztowicz, in a bit of crisis negotiation, talked her mother and father down to a year.
Just weeks after high school graduation, she was on her way to France, hired by a couple in Saint-Tropez to be a live-in nanny for their 2-year-old son.
“They wanted Noé out of the house all day on Sundays, mainly so they could recover from their parties the night before,” noted Jurksztowicz. “Saint-Tropez is yacht-friendly, but really not so kid-friendly, not a lot of parks and such. It was hard to find things to do on a Sunday morning.”
The local Catholic church provided safe harbor and respite for an hour or two each Sunday. Jurksztowicz and Noé would sit in the pew for Mass, the boy transfixed by the choir and the music. It really resonated with him. Jurksztowicz returned recently and found out that Noé, now 20, often plays the organ for services in that same Saint-Tropez church.
In only a matter of weeks, Jurksztowicz said, she was fluent in her new language, to the point of dreaming in it. By the following fall, slightly less than a year later, she was back home in Toronto, enrolled at Ryerson, where she earned her degree in the school of radio and TV arts.
Roughly a dozen years after returning from France, and after myriad broadcast jobs that included a brief run appearing on the real “Hockey Night in Canada,” she landed here in Boston with NESN.
She heads out the door each day for work delighted to fulfill a dream she began to conjure while watching Leafs games on Saturday night propped on her father’s lap.
“Mom and Dad were right — our life doesn’t start and end, necessarily, with high school if you don’t get into where you want to go and all that,” Jurksztowicz said, recounting the message long ago imparted by Zenon and Anna. “They trusted I’d come back and apply myself, but with a whole different perspective on how I wanted to do things, what I wanted to do.”
School’s out and life is just beginning for so many kids. The journey, even sometimes with its unexpected turns, is what makes the destination.
