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Leavey School of Business Santa Clara University

Community Fellows Blog Posts

Jordan Johnson-Wojnicki: Applying Course Concepts to Work

Jordan connects classroom learning with skills for her Fellowship.

 

2020-21 LSB Community Fellows

I have really enjoyed my time interning with the Office of Economic Development for the City of San Jose. This quarter, my focus has been on the Greater Downtown Covid-19 Assistance grants. We selected our 35 companies to receive the grant and are now in charge of sending and processing the grant agreements with the city. Because of this, I have become the liaison between the businesses and the city. There are several different groups that the grant agreements need to be passed through including finance and city management. Each group had different standards as to how the grant agreement should be filled out which meant that I needed to contact the business at least once, if not multiple times, to make the appropriate edits and ensure that the grants were moving through the process in a timely manner.

Streamlining the communication between the city bureaucracy and grant recipients became my mission for this quarter. My role has taught me to use a lot of the strong interpersonal communication skills that I have honed in my business classes such as the business communication class and other leadership experiences on campus. I am constantly on my email or calling the appropriate parties with updates, so I need to make sure I keep my messages succinct and effective. I have also been able to use some of the legal terminology that I learned in my business law class through the contract negotiations. Many of these terms were foreign to me in the context of an actual job so it has been great applying this wisdom in my internship.

I would definitely advise other LSB students to utilize a lot of the knowledge they receive in the classroom from the wide variety of topics in the Jesuit education system to benefit their work in the non-corporate setting. We have the benefit as SCU students of getting a very well-rounded education in a variety of topics including social justice, religion, and diversity outside of our traditional business major. This can only help to make us more diversified when approaching issues that the city faces each day when combating human rights and societal problems in the context of government and public policy. It has definitely been helpful for me to rely on my knowledge and understanding from those classes and many of my business core classes such as economics and business ethics to assist with the daily work as a business development employee.

NPI, NPI Fellows