Binder #: 157
Major: Economics, Mathematics
Passion: Housing
Organization: Habitat for Humanity of McLean County, State Farm
Executive Summary: In my experience as a CPP intern, I worked in the Strategic Resources Department of State Farm and was at Habitat for Humanity of McLean County for my non-profit. In Strategic Resources, a rather large department in State Farm that circles around research and how to internally improve State Farm, I was given a research and presentation project about the lower half of the middle market of the economy. I was essentially tasked with doing secondary research on this income bracket to find out what characteristics make up this group of people and what their needs are. Then using this research, I found and presented different products that State Farm could offer that would make State Farm a better strategic fit with this group of people. With Habitat for Humanity, I had a larger variety of experiences despite spending a lesser amount of my time there. My projects at Habitat included coordinating and running two focus groups, gathering and writing a Habitat family story, and fundraising for our golf outing. The two focus groups contained two different groups of people, one devoted Habitat donors, the other the general public. Different kinds of insights were gathered from each of the groups in regards to how Habitat can better go about publicizing itself in the Bloomington-Normal community. The golf outing fundraiser portion of my internship was unlike anything I have ever done before, as it involved making cold calls to local businesses to ask for sponsorships. In summary, this internship exceeded all of my expectations. I stayed very busy with extremely relevant work, and it was an experience that I will be able to call upon in my future academic and professional career.