Teens Get Taste of Real World at Summer Jobs : Workplace: As they return to school, three Southland youths recount lessons learned while allegedly on vacation.

Working full time this summer left Jennie Fuguet with more than just extra spending money.

“It gave me more of an open personality,” said the 16-year-old Dana Point resident who had to abandon her shyness while attending to customers from behind a movie theater concession stand.

“I had to keep saying ‘Good to see you’ and ‘Enjoy the movie,’ ” Fuguet said. “Now, I can’t stop talking.”

Fuguet was one of the 23 million youths nationwide who gave up the pleasures of a summer vacation for the challenges of a job. It is an annual coming-of-age ritual, one that teaches young workers about confidence and career choices, goals and fears, the jobs they want and the ones they don’t.

The Times followed Fuguet and two other Southland youths--Brent McFarland of San Pedro and Claudia Rios of South-Central Los Angeles--during the past three months as they received a full-time dose of the working world. Now, with summer behind them, all three teen-agers said their jobs left them with plenty of experience and few regrets.

“I’d like my summer break now,” said McFarland, a 17-year-old San Pedro High School senior who worked full time at an architectural firm during his eight-week-long midyear vacation.

However, McFarland is eager to work full time again. “I liked working full time a lot better than going to school. I don’t like sitting in a hot classroom. I’d rather be doing something resourceful.”

Besides learning to use computers to draw blueprints, McFarland said he has become more organized and self directed at school as a result of working for the architecture firm of Rodin Bieberly Associates in San Pedro.

“I got more in the way of goals,” said McFarland, who continues to work at the architectural firm part time after school. “I just want to finish off the best I can instead of just getting by.

“I don’t think anybody at work would tolerate that attitude,” the aspiring architect said.

Rios came away from her six-week-long job at Kaiser Permanente’s Los Angeles MedicalCenter knowing what career to pursue: physical therapy.

The 18-year-old had long been interested in the medical field but was unable to select a specific profession. After watching the dramatic recovery of a heart patient under the care of a physical therapist, Rios was impressed enough to make her choice.

In the beginning, the patient “couldn’t even sit up. In the end, she was walking,” said Rios, who starts her freshman year at UC Riverside next week. “The physical therapist would see the progress.

“I made up my mind,” Rios said. “Now I know what exactly in the medical field to shoot for.”

The job was not always easy. The Jefferson High School graduate had to deal with her own fears of working with extremely ill patients. When she was first left alone with Linda, the heart patient, Rios said she was afraid.

“She was thin. She was 45 years old but she looked so old,” Rios said. “I was scared of being in alone with her.”

Ultimately the two grew very close and “I saw her progress in the long run,” Rios said.

More than half the money Rios earned is in the bank, and the rest has been spent on clothes for college and gifts to her family, such as tennis shoes.

“I felt more responsible,” said Rios of drawing a paycheck. “It was like I had done something good and that’s how I was being rewarded.”

The financial rewards, however, were not always great, as Fuguet discovered while working at the Edwards Cinema in Mission Viejo.

After comparing notes with members of the color guard at Capistrano Valley High School, Fuguet found her summer wages--the legal minimum of $4.25 an hour--were below many of her friends. And the job has not helped her decide what career to pursue.

“There are so many things out there that I don’t know where to begin,” Fuguet said.

Still, Fuguet continues to work at the theater part time and isn’t thinking about trading up for higher-paying employment. The job may not pay as well as others, and it is not a long-term career choice, but Fuguet enjoys it for other reasons.

“It’s like a huge group of friends,” Fuguet said. “I really like it. I thought it would just be work.”