Located in Indianapolis, Indiana, Lutheran Child and Family Services (LCFS) is a non-profit organization that provides care and treatment for children who exhibit behavioral impairments, victims of human trafficking, as well as provide a “Living Group Home” for young men who are transitioning from foster care to the real world. They also provide Emergency Shelter Care for young adults who were removed from the Department of Child Services. My position at LCFS was a Data Analyst and my position entailed editing donors’ databases and reviewing them for accuracy, correcting/updating the database when duplicated records are identified, parse historical data to identify fundraising trends, and more. I attended weekly meetings with the team and other fellow interns to discuss our action plan for the week and what we were working on. I also had a weekly meeting with my direct supervisor who gave me assignments and projects to work on for the week.

My main point of contact was my supervisor, Barbara Walters, who directed and assigned tasks I needed to get done, informed me of any deadlines I needed to know, and offered the resources I could use to accomplish these tasks. These tasks are assigned through one-on-one weekly meetings and for each meeting, she offered detailed instructions on how to complete them, which I found really helpful. Along with weekly virtual meetings, the organization mainly communicated through email. The organization was a "work-alone" type of environment where everyone completed their own individual tasks then met with Barbara to discuss next steps. Personally, I prefer zoom meetings for communicating with co-workers because I am much more comfortable receiving instructions and duties through face-to-face contact rather than through email. Nonetheless, I did not have any trouble with emails and with everyone that I have interacted with, they were all fast to respond back to my emails and any questions I might have. Furthermore, since I had a flexible relationship with my supervisor, I never felt nervous communicating any concerns to her. On the contrary, she encouraged me to inform her if I was having a hard week or if I had any questions or concerns regarding a certain project that I was working on for the internship.

There were several tasks that I was assigned throughout my time at LCFS. For instance, one of my most time-consuming projects was sifting through thousands of clients' data, who visited the pantry and recognizing any duplicates while also checking to see if they visited more than twice per month. This type of project is done every couple of months in preparation for the Annual Report that is presented to the donors. Another large project that I was assigned was editing donor data where I worked greatly with the donor database called eTapestry. In eTapestry, I was able to search any donor in the database and check their data for accuracy. In each donor’s profile, I was to check their salutations and revise their home addresses if need be, such as changing address abbreviations to their spelled out form (Dr to Drive, Ct to Court, Apt to Apartment, etc). Furthermore, I also worked on mailing lists for donors and checking to see if there were any duplicated and that salutations were correct for each donor. I believe I was a great asset to this organization because of the great labor hours I have saved Barbara from having to de-duplicate thousands of client information herself every 3 months. This duplicated data that I edited was published in the Annual Report and used for grants, thus benefiting the organization substantially.

At LCFS, I learned that I am able to work well under pressure or under a fixed deadline as well learning how to analyze large pieces of data. I also learned how to communicate well with co-workers through email and zoom meetings. I was also able to gain knowledge about my field of software development through completing projects.

I learned how to work well under pressure and how to analyze when I was given the project of editing thousands of client data in just under 2 weeks while balancing that with school work and my other job. I was able to put in several consecutive hours on the weekends in order to complete this large project. I also improved my communication skills when I attended weekly meetings with my supervisor and fellow interns and had 2 minutes each meeting to discuss my assigned tasks and action plan for the week. I was able to learn more about my career when I was working on those projects and learned how to be more analytical and detailed in my work.

Furthermore, I have been able to use the skills I have learned from my internship to enhance my coursework. For example, by taking on big projects, I have been able to learn how to become more analytical in my classes because of how analytic-heavy my work in the internship was. Parsing through thousands of donor data in each project I completed enhanced my ability to analyze my coursework, especially my coding classes, such as Computing II.