Learning While Helping

by Cecilia Conrad

My name is Cecilia Conrad. I am a senior and majoring in business management here at UMM. This was my first semester working for CST. I was drawn to work at CST because of the challenge it presented. I had never worked at a job like this before and I wanted to learn skills that I could utilize after graduation.

This semester I worked on a project called: Promoting Native Artists. I worked with 4 Directions Development (4DD), which is an organization in Red Lake Minnesota, to help them best service the artist in their community. My project is broken down into two different parts. The first is to interview Native artists about their experiences with 4DD and their experiences as artists in general. Being able to hear their stories and passions for art was an especially cool experience for me. I had very little knowledge about Native art when I first started this project and was a little nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to ask the right questions. However, after speaking with Amy Mondloch, she was able to to give me some great advice. She explained how I am suppose to be a learner and listener. She taught me not to go into interviews trying to control the conversation, but to let the conversation flow naturally. I became more relaxed about the interviews I was having thanks to her pep talk. I believe I heard better answers because I had actual conversations with the people I interviewed.

The second part of my project was research, research, and more research. I researched before my first interview to make sure I was asking the right questions. I researched during the interviews to find other programs that were working with artist as well, and I researched after my interviews to find possible solutions to some of the problems the artists were facing. I spent probably 85% of my time at CST researching.

Some days it did become hard scanning from website to website looking for one interesting thing to take away, but I always made sure to break up my work. If I was sick of staring at the computer I decided to try to get a hold of an artist to interview. I also did this with the artist interviews, since those sometimes took a lot of emotional energy. I flip flopped back and forth between the two tasks to make sure I didn’t get overwhelmed.

The end of the semester is quickly approaching, and I hope to have a completed report that talks about how 4DD can increase attendance at their workshops and best help their artists succeed, as well as report on the other programs which try to do work similar to 4DD. I hope that this can give them some ideas that they will take into the future and use! In the short time that I have worked at CST I’m better at working independently, I’ve developed better time management skills and have learned skills that can help me with interviews in the future. I know that I will learn more as I continue my time at CST.