Student Spotlight: Grace Fraczek

Internship experience

I was able to intern in the marketing department of the Idaho Youth Ranch. The title of my position was “Organizational Dynamo,” It was my responsibility to organize the company T-drive within various departments of social enterprise and marketing. From there, my supervisor was flexible and wanted to give me the experience I needed to develop post-grad skill sets. Skill sets like supply chain systems thinking and application, knowledge of e-commerce, procedural documents, and organization, and working with others on current store projects, like the opening of a new store in Post Falls.

What I learned from my experiential learning opportunity

I was able to learn the “life path” of a donation within eCommerce distribution, I was also able to improve my understanding of organizational systems thinking, as well as how to organize multitudes of different data effectively and efficiently. The Idaho Youth Ranch has a unique model of business, but experiencing many different aspects of their system, was significantly beneficial to my understanding of what is needed for a nonprofit to run successfully.

Public Service in my experiential learning opportunity

The Idaho Youth Ranch is a non-profit organization center on providing programs and services to help and nurture troubled youth. Because of this, there was a large focus on building and giving back to the community. In each department, there is universal respect for the Youth Ranch Mission and how to embody those objectives in the work each does. With each task, I was able to do; from writing procedural forms to serving breakfast to the warehouse workers, to helping e-commerce, I knew that I was an important cog in a system built to serve and better the communities around Idaho.

How the Global Studies program and the experiential learning opportunity shaped my career goals

This experience allowed me to further advance in my personal and academic goals. Having the opportunity to apply what I am learning in economics to the real world was such a great experience. Knowing how one system impacts many others through micro and macro lenses became applicable within my internship. I continually applied my writing and communication skills. The fact that I can walk away from this internship with a multitude of new skill sets and an enhanced understanding of how global contexts apply at a local level speaks volumes.