Alexis Perez: Slow and Steady Wins the Race
As I look back on my fellowship experience thus far, I cannot believe it has already been four months since I first started working with the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley (HFSV). I spent my first quarter primarily creating a new system to track attendance data for our Family College Success Center (FCSC) and scheduling a tour/student panel with SCU for some of the students we work with. Those 10 weeks of work proved to be challenging as I quickly dove in to learn more about the organization and how daily operations were carried out.
As an undergraduate business student we often learn about business in the context of large corporations to get us ready for the workforce. With this, I’ve learned about topics such as outsourcing to maximize profit and increase efficiency, a relatively standard practice of many businesses today. In fact, the FCSC operates similarly by partnering with organizations that already offer programs that our students can benefit from — essentially outsourcing to provide the best and most diverse portfolio of programming that we can. Therefore, I knew that there would be parts of the Foundation that I would be familiar with as they are standard business practices.
Although there were some familiarities, most of our business classes wouldn’t have prepared me for the everyday experience of working in a nonprofit. In my classes, I measure my own success by completion of assignments or test scores, and am often measuring company success based on dollar amounts in my accounting coursework. Working at HFSV has taught me the importance of rethinking the way I evaluate my own performance by focusing on long term growth instead of immediate success. In my first quarter, I found myself overwhelmed with the work I was doing because I was evaluating my performance based on how well I was contributing to our overall mission.
I came into my fellowship wanting to be able to fix everything in our society and community, but I quickly realized I alone can’t make that change by working a few hours a week. Fortunately, I have a supervisor that is genuinely interested in my individual success and truly cares about the quality of the work being performed. She has taught me a lot about balancing my personal investment in the Foundation’s mission and the realistic work that I can accomplish during my time there. With the encouragement of her and the team, I have felt more confident in my performance and the small impact I’ve made, which ultimately contributes to accomplishing the long term goals of the HFSV.