Madi Clelland: Feeling Ready to Take on More!
Through the LSB Community Fellows program, I have been lucky enough to intern in the Corporate Work Study office at Cristo Rey San Jose High School in East San Jose. Cristo Rey provides an incredible education for low-income students in the greater San Jose area and allows them to pay for their private education through a work study program in which they are placed at businesses across the Silicon Valley. The work they complete there helps to educate them in ways that learning in a classroom never could. The Cristo Rey network does an amazing job helping and preparing students across the country for successful and productive adult lives.
As the first semester at Cristo Rey San Jose begins to wind down, I finally feel like I know enough about the school and what I will be learning and helping with for the rest of the school year! It is so fun working in such a fast-paced environment and I have loved being thrown right into the mix. The Corporate Work Study office is constantly buzzing with activity as students and faculty pop in and out and the Work Study coordinators run around helping the students and partners every day.
One of my main tasks throughout this quarter has been to help out with Magis classes on Friday mornings, which has been an awesome surprise! These classes are centered around various topics relating to the workplace and provide me with time to meet and learn from all of the students. I greatly look forward to Friday mornings when I get to come into a new class and help in any way that I can.
Aside from helping out in the classroom, I have also been working on administrative tasks such as organizing a job description database within Salesforce and organizing students’ timecards that they receive each workday from their supervisors. This has been fun and challenging because I have never worked with Salesforce before. Looking forward to the end of the quarter and my time in 2018, I want to continue with these main tasks but also learn more about Cristo Rey’s relationship with their corporate partners. I am planning on going to sales pitches that occur when Cristo Rey begins to talk to potential corporate partners. I would also like to attend site visits with existing corporate partners to see students at their workplace. Overall, I have learned so much at Cristo Rey already and am looking forward to becoming a larger part of the community at the school!