Practicum

For my practicum I took the class, PLCY213, Foundations of Nonprofit Leadership & Social Innovation. This course is designed for students interested in creating change in the world around them. From the syllabus, this class claimed to provide an overview of the nonprofit sector, help us develop practical skills for analyzing and addressing problems in this sector, and offer opportunities to apply these skills to tackle some of the most pressing challenges today. I found this class through the list of courses provided to us as a “alternative practicum class” for those of us who were not completing our practicum through an internship or volunteering experience. After researching the courses on this list, PLCY213 seemed like a very interesting option and I was intrigued to learn more about what the course description stated. I really enjoyed taking this course to complete my scholars practicum, and I would recommend it to any future Media Scholar. The advice I would give to a future Media Scholar deciding what to do with their practicum is to choose something that seems interesting to them, don’t choose something that seems like the easiest option to get it done, choose something that will challenge them and teach them new ideas. This class challenged me in ways that I wasn’t prepared for at the start, but helped me grow tremendously as a student and a person.

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This class has allowed my scholars experience to come full circle. My scholars journey started on Scholar’s Service Day in August 2019 when we volunteered at a local non-profit organization, Food and Friends. We spent all day bagging food for the people living in the surrounding neighborhoods that are living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses that place limitations on their ability to provide nourishment for themselves. On this day we were able to bond with each other before starting class together, while also giving back to our local neighborhoods. In PLCY213, one of the major assignments is a nonprofit shadow experience. In regular years we would have been required to contact and shadow a member of the nonprofit world, however because of COVID-19, this year we simply interviewed someone who has a connection to the nonprofit sector. For my interview, I choose to connect back to Food and Friends with the help of my scholars professor. She was able to connect me with Greig Stewart, a long-time volunteer with Food and Friends and the previous College Park Scholars director. While interviewing Greig I was able to learn all about the volunteering side of the nonprofit sector. He told me about how he began at Food and Friends, his daily duties, his favorite part of being there, and the connections has made from his experiences. After the interview we were required to analyze our findings about the nonprofit sector and connect them with topics we have learned about in class.

To the left I linked this assignment where it goes into more detail about my interview experience and the ways I was able to connect it to the information we had learned in class. I believe this work has shown how I have learned so much in information, as well as professional skills. In terms of class information, this class, and most specifically this assignment, have taught me a lot about recognizing our own values of social change, respecting the opinions of those who

hold other experiences than us, understanding how the categories of race, gender, class, religion, and sexual orientation shape the participation of nonprofit activities, and summarizing the trends in the nonprofit sector. Before taking PLCY213 I was very unknowledgeable about the nonprofit sector but through this class and the experience of the interview assignment I was able to learn much more. On the other hand, this assignment taught me professional skills. We had to appropriately contact the person we wanted to talk with and set up an interview via zoom. In these interviews we had to come prepared with our questions and remember to be grateful for the time these individuals were taking out of their daily lives to speak to us. Interviewing is such a large aspect of networking and finding a career, therefore being able to practice these skills in a less intense environment was a very helpful experience. I have grown as student, professional, and a person through the material I have learned in this class, as well as the various experiences we had with the nonprofit sector.

Moving Forward

Moving forward with my college education and life in general, my practicum experience is going to be able to support me in ways I could have never imagined. With a goal of having a career in the digital marketing, I have the desire to help people by using digital advertising techniques that I will acquired through my classes here at UMD, as well as through various internship opportunities. I am currently enrolled in BMGT350, Marketing Principles and Organization, which is my first class for my marketing major. Next semester I am registered to take the next marketing class on my four year plan, along with a management class for my management double major. As I move through these classes and acquire more knowledge in the areas of marketing and management, I will keep everything that I learned from my practicum experience in my head, as these skills and information will become very helpful as I go through my final years here at UMD.

When graduating, as stated above, I will be searching for a career in the digital marketing world. Through my scholars experience and practicum experience, I have begun to gain an interest in the nonprofit world. Helping people is something that I enjoy very much and I would be very interested in figuring out ways to use digital marketing and advertising to help nonprofit organizations gain volunteers or donations to support their causes. As I am very interested in the creative side of advertising, I would love to be a marketing chair at a nonprofit that helps the organization make videos asking for aid or of successful events to show off who they are as an organization. My experience in PLCY213 has taught me the basic information about how nonprofits are run and where they get their grants or donations from, therefore I would be able to enter my career knowing the necessary information to figure out the proper tactics in acquiring support. Media, Self and Society introduced me to my love for digital marketing at the beginning of Freshman year, and through the completion of my two years and the practicum assignment, I have been able to discover a possible future for myself and I am extremely grateful.