Year of Graduation: 2009
Major: Music and Business Administration
Current Address:Â Ellettsville, IN
How were you engaged with ARC? Not just the seminar/internship/fellowship but describe the type of project.
Summer internship with State Farm and the UNITY community center. Projects with UNITY included assisting with their summer camp, hands-on work with the kids, grant writing, assistance with tech organization at the center, creating logic models, and assisting with camp curriculum.
Where are you now?
Working in Bloomington, Indiana as a Training Project Manager at a medical device company. I love my job! I volunteer with several organizations in Bloomington. I am heavily involved with the Monroe Community Kitchen, an organization dedicated to ending hunger in the Bloomington area, serving on their board of directors and chairing their board development committee. In the spare time I manage to get every now and then I garden, practice yoga, and my husband and I work on renovating our 1930s bungalow.
Where did ARC take you professionally? Are you doing work that connects back to ARC in some way?
My professional work doesn’t connect directly to what I did with ARC, but several skill sets I learned there have helped me with the non-profits I work with.
Where did ARC take you personally? Are you engaged in community work that is ARC-like?
Absolutely! ARC gave me the confidence to serve on a board of directors in a new community from a young age and also gave me the knowledge to vet boards for whether or not they’d be a good fit for me personally. My volunteer work is especially aligned with what I did at ARC, especially working with low-income populations focused on children.
Did ARC teach you what we were supposed to teach you? Did we teach you anything that was a surprise or outside of the learning objectives?
I think so. I certainly learned more about life outside of college/the real world by being involved with ARC than I did in any IWU class! I didn’t really know what to expect with ARC when I went into it, so my expectations weren’t very specific. There’s no doubt in my mind that even high expectations going in would have been met. I remember more of my ARC education than most other classes or areas of study at IWU, thanks mostly in part to it being so applicable to my life after college.
Share a great memory about ARC/IWU.
I remember being crammed in to one of the small on-campus houses being tasked with crafting a mission statement at one of our meetings. I still remember how hard a task it was and how we argued over every single word and piece of sentence structure! It made a big impression and I always think of that experience whenever I’m reading or interacting with a mission statement.