This past school year SWIF hosted a couple of local students who are job shadowing and learning about opportunities available locally. This is the first of two stories about Kristine Karl, a Ridgewater College student and Maddie Hoel, a Hutchinson High School student.
Ridgewater College student Kristine Karl
Kristine is a non-traditional student in the two-year accounting program on the
Hutchinson campus. She enrolled in classes last fall after 15 years of working in medical records. In November, she started working at SWIF under a work study program.
She has pitched in and helped with some general administrative work around the SWIF office, but she has also learned about processing loan payments, cash deposits, W-9 forms, general lookups in the database and scanning paperwork into the database. Reading a text book is good knowledge but actually doing the steps and understanding the steps is different, Kristine said.
“It takes a little bit of hands-on to make sense,” she added.
Next year, her program classes include auditing, managerial accounting, fund/nonprofit accounting and intermediate accounting. She is hopeful these classes, along with the experience she has had at SWIF, will help her decide on a direction for a job once she is done. Accounting is a broad field and job responsibilities vary by industry and organization. To help gain both work experience and exposure to the various accounting areas she is considering working through a temporary accounting placement firm.
Kristine will finish her A.A.S. Accounting degree in May 2016 and will continue work study hours at SWIF over the summer months.
How can you lend a hand to a local student looking for direction in their education? Contact your local high school or technical school and offer some job shadowing opportunities for students. You might be rewarded with some great connections or future employees for your business.
