Mac Aronhalt's Double Life

Likely, your summer was spent at camps, practicing your sport or deepening your love for your interests. For Mac Aronhalt ’27, his summer looked a lot different. 

Aronhalt worked in both construction and as a dishwasher at The Black Duck restaurant in Lancaster, VA. He spent his summer working in 100-degree heat installing tennis court nets for Randolph-Macon College. As of now, his construction work has come to a close, but his other job, working at The Black Duck, can require more than 24 hours of his time on weekends. Many Saturdays, Aronhalt spends 12 hours of his day at the Black Duck, and during three-day weekends, Mac works both Saturday and Sunday, totaling 24 hours of work.

At the start of his tenure at the Black Duck, he was only a dishwasher, but through consistent dedication and reliability, he worked his way to a cook position. When asked on how he manages his time with such a large responsibility, Aronhalt responded, “Before working the weekends, I would just mess around Saturday and Sunday. [I would] do a little bit of schoolwork on both days, but not necessarily be completely focused. Now that I’m working Saturdays, it forces me to be completely focused on Sundays. The time commitment puts me in a spot where I have no choice, which is kind of helpful in the sense that there’s no other option but to do the work.”

There is no question that juggling work from a college preparatory school as well as double shifts at a restaurant would be a responsibility that few students could handle. Aronhalt, one of the few, keeps his head down. Maintaining his grades while earning his own keep, building a work ethic almost none of his peers possess. 

In a school atmosphere that is a-plenty with students unable to focus on their schoolwork without tabbing over to Roblox or Clash Royale, Mac Aronhalt is an outlier. A student who is able to take on many important responsibilities and handle all of them, Mac leads by example. He doesn’t boast nor draw attention to his job. He works hard and goes largely unnoticed.