I’m excited to be back at the Venango Chamber for my winter break! I was the intern over the summer, then spent the fall at Slippery Rock University for my sophomore year. I spent my freshmen year studying from home, so although I’m in my second year of school, I’m just now getting to experience campus.

At Slippery Rock University, my major is Finance and I have minors in both Dance: Pedagogy and Dance: Performance, and I’m also a member of the Honors College. I recently began taking classes specific to my major like Macroeconomics, Productivity Software, Financial Accounting, and Managerial Finance. I have also made efforts to take my General Education classes as honors/leadership courses.

At school, I’m also involved in the National Honors Society for Dance Arts and the Multi-disciplinary Arts Collective. I am also in the school’s Chess Club— something I never thought I’d never join, but have grown to really enjoy.

At the Chamber during the summer, I was able to gain a lot of Excel experience, which made the introduction into my Quantitative Reasoning and Productivity Software classes less stressful. The internship also helped me better my organizational techniques, through learning to organize files and using tools like planners. My skills in customer service have improved, too, through my time working with the community.

In college, I have learned more Excel tools that I hope to apply to my festival spreadsheets to increase their efficiency. I have also been running a Twitter page for one of my clubs, so I feel like I was able to keep up my professional social media activity.

One of my favorite tasks at the Chamber has been festival planning, especially because I know how much the community treasures the memories made. Helping out with the newsletter is also a lot of fun since I have gotten more involved with writing articles.

In this internship, I feel like I can make a difference to help out a community that has been nothing but welcoming to me. I enjoyed working at the Chamber so much last summer that I couldn’t think of another way to spend my winter break, and I’m excited to be back in the summer.

This article was published in the Venango Chamber’s January 2022 VenangoWorks! Newsletter.