Emily is a second-year CIPA student who is concentrating her studies on Human Rights and Social Justice.
While I’ve been at CIPA, I have had the opportunity to take a variety of classes on everything from systems thinking to statistics. The course that was most rewarding for me, though, was Professor Dan Lamb’s Consulting for Non-Profit and Government Organizations class.
Students were split up into teams and assigned a real consulting client. My group was lucky enough to work with Cornerstone Family Healthcare, an
organization that has several Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers across New York State.
Our research for the project included a focus group and a survey, which provided data that we were able to use in making recommendations to our client on how they could use their web site to increase patient acquisition and retention. The goal of the project was to help ensure the long term financial sustainability of the site without having to revert to federal funding.
This experience working with a client and learning to leverage each individual team member’s strengths served me well working for the Department of Defense (DOD) during my internship this summer. While working for the DoD, I specialized in Human Resources metrics and reporting but I also was given the opportunity to work on two group projects for the agency.This project was incredibly rewarding because it allowed us to apply the individual expertise and skills that each group member brought to bear on this real world problem. In the end, we were able to provide recommendations to an organization that is making a real difference in a community that lacks affordable and convenient healthcare services. Personally, the project allowed me to create lasting relationships with my group mates, which was meaningful. I was also able to utilize all of the knowledge I had learned in Professor Lamb’s class, as well as my other first-year CIPA courses, and have the experience of seeing how it translated to a real world setting.
One project focused on creating a dashboard for senior leadership and involved working with individuals from across the agency. The second project was with a group of fellow interns and focused on creating standard operating procedures for several Corporate Communications processes. While these projects were very different in their subject matter and objectives, they both utilized the skills I had formed in Professor Lamb’s class regarding teamwork, leadership, and time management. Ultimately both of these projects were a success!