Friday, January 23, 2015

Hello everybody my name is Luis G Cardenas Camacho, but everyone calls me Camacho. I'm currently a senior working on my BS in Public Service Public Policy with a concentration in Public Leadership and Management a minor in Nonprofit Leadership and Management and a certificate in Public Administration and Public Management. I am originally from Mexicali, Baja California Mexico, but I moved to Arizona at a very young age and it has been my home ever since. I served four years in the Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq on three separate occasions. I am very proud of my service and consider it an privilege and responsibility to serve as an advocate for my fellow Veterans. Currently, I am the President of the Student Veteran Association at ASU Downtown and hold other leadership positions in organizations like The Mission Continues and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Through my advocacy work I have come in contact with some great people, many of you included, and organizations that really care for the well being of our Veterans and together we are working for the betterment of our community.
This semester I will be doing my internship at an analytics company named, education Leadership and analytics (eLa). This company has a variety of clients across the 3 sectors (business, government, and nonprofit) and provides their expertise to empower their clients to make the correct business decisions. The reason the L in leadership is capitalized is because this company understands that without the proper leadership the education and analytics pieces fall apart and are unable to really affect the change the community needs. The reason I chose this internship over other opportunities is because I believe in the way this company views themselves, not only as a for profit entity but as a launch pad for change and progress in the community. I believe that in order for us to become the leaders our communities need we need to be educated and well informed, be willing to be a capital L Leaders by taking risks and having the interest of others at heart, but also we need to have the facts on our side and that is where the analytics piece comes in. With analytics you get numbers, and even though people can add whatever interpretation they want to those numbers at the end of the day those numbers will still be the same. That being said, I am not a numbers person and have very little experience in analytics, however I consider myself a community leader and understand that having the numbers to back my statements and positions will make me a better Leader. As far as this internship goes my three goals for this semester are as follow:
  1. To better understand how and where the three sectors interact and in what areas can they learn from each other or collaborate.
  2. To gain a greater understanding of the analytics process and determine how analytics can be beneficial to each of the sectors.
  3. To get hands on experience and thus a better understanding of the private sector, since most of my career experience has been spent on the nonprofit and government sectors.