Author: zyw

Almost three months have passed since I started my internship at BRAVE for Veterans, Inc. I witnessed the change in myself. At the beginning of my internship, I knew little about my supervisor, the field of veteran service, and the employment market for veterans. Though I still have a lot to learn, I am surely much more familiar with my work than before. While gaining new skills from my learning experience, I have been helping BRAVE research into the latest circumstances of veteran employment and also potential employers planning to hire veterans.

What I didn’t know at the start was that I actually learned a lot from my supervisor, Mr. Leroy Ashwood. By working closely with him, I found out that he is more than a successful social entrepreneur. He has a deep passion for his career advocating for veterans and a genuine attitude towards people regardless of their background, which he considered essential to his work. He showed me important qualities of a dedicated social worker, and I will keep them in mind.

Having attended virtual conferences and listened to podcasts about veteran service, I was amazed by the tight community of veterans and their family members. Building and maintaining connections are especially important.

I’ve been looking into the statistics provided by the Department of Labor focusing on the unemployment rate of veterans. This is part of the research for the upcoming project that helps veterans find jobs. With the latest July data just released, I learned that the overall unemployment rate of veterans last month is about ten percent, which is significantly higher than the percentage of July 2019. The virus really makes a lot of veterans lose their jobs. As I divided the data by different age groups, I found out that veterans aged 18 to 24 have an especially high unemployment rate, with 18.3% unemployed. Young veterans struggle to settle down at the start of their career.

I also looked into employers interested in hiring veterans. I then made sheets and tables including useful information, along with reports analyzing and summarizing the data. I am sure this will be the basis for the talent search project that will provide support to veterans looking for well-paid jobs.

Looking back at my experience so far, I wish I had known that I can be more proactive and give some constructive feedback about the projects I will be working on, instead of simply following instructions. I think this would be a good way for me to dedicate more effort to my internship and therefore gain more knowledge and skills from it. I also wish I had realized earlier that it’s important to have a fixed schedule when I take online classes and work at the same time. That would have helped me remove unnecessary distractions and become more efficient. If I had a chance to give advice to others who want to work at BRAVE or in the veteran service industry, I would say the key to nonprofit work is usually your determination or how much you care about what you are doing.

Several weeks have passed since my last post, and my internship at Brave for Veterans has been getting more and more challenging. However, once I found out that I possessed the skills necessary to complete my tasks, my confidence grew. My experience has also been more and more rewarding in terms of what I learned.

After the initial phase of making adjustments and preparations, I have begun to research potential employers that Brave can connect with and that plan to hire service members. I am primarily focusing on the list of companies in Business Roundtable, an organization consisting of CEOs of U.S. corporations vital to the economy, as they tend to create more job opportunities during re-opening. This is part of the project that Brave is planning to launch, in which Brave will charge a fee for providing talent search service to employers.

I constantly apply what I learned at Brandeis to assist with my internship. My role requires that I be familiar with the different branches within Brave. My supervisor recently sent me an Excel sheet containing financial projections about the coming years, which was complex and full of statistics. I realized that analyzing and interpreting data using Excel was what I did in my physics lab, in which I needed to write a report after each experiment. I collected data with my partners and used Excel to extract valid information. This helped with my data analysis skills and made me feel more comfortable with this kind of task in a working environment.

Because I will have to look into the employment market as part of my internship, many of my tasks are related to economics. Though I am not directly involved in making projections about future available job opportunities, I frequently encounter basic economics concepts that I was introduced to in my microeconomics class during my communications with my supervisor and in virtual meetings. For example, when making plans for the talent search project, we will look at the demand and supply of the workforce, which will impact employee wages and influence the price that we are going to charge those employers for our talent search service.

As I begin the process of identifying potential employers, I need to do a lot of online searches about these companies. I not only search for their hiring strategies about service members, but I also want to identify mutual benefits between them and Brave, as these will support a long-term collaboration. I keep asking myself questions during the process and filling the informational gaps by looking at more sources. This is clearly a task requiring integrated skills, but the habit of inquiry comes from my learning experience at Brandeis. I found the history class I took last semester quite educational in this respect, as I examined many historical sources and searched for answers to things I was confused about.

Recalling the moment when I submitted my resume at a virtual career fair, I realize that more than three months have passed. After I secured my internship opportunity, I tried to envision my tasks in the future, but the fact is that since the start of this internship, my experience has been truly unexpected and interesting.

The organization I am working for is Brave For Veterans Inc. It is a non-profit organization whose core mission is to contribute to veterans’ well-being by helping them secure self-sustaining employment. Brave closely collaborates with the state government, research institutions and other organizations to identify and provide career resources and services. Brave is also planning to launch business projects that gather funding to better support its own sustainability and fulfillment of its mission.

When I applied for this position at Brave, I was unsure about whether I could be offered the chance to work. However, I was pretty sure about why I wanted to give it a try. I have always wanted to apply what I learn to making an impact on society. Not only are veterans honorable individuals who I would like to support, but I can also relate the work at Brave to my major, which is economics. Researching the employment market can be meaningful and educational to me. In fact, as the virus continues to cause job losses across the country, finding employment has become a growing challenge for many, and it can be especially hard for veterans. Therefore, I hope what I am doing now with my colleagues at Brave can be helpful in this special time.

Currently, Brave is taking actions and trying to restructure its strategies according to the situations that are continuing to change due to the virus. We are looking at various data and statistics to predict the future and prepare for it. One thing we see is that as the economy starts to reopen, there will likely be an increasing demand of labor from the employers, but the competition in the labor market can be fierce. Many branches of Brave are working to further our mission in different areas of focus, including legislation, research, and communications etc.

My main task is to connect with potential employers that may be interested in hiring veterans, learn about their needs, and identify mutual benefits, while marketing the employment services that Brave provides. Through my work, I hope to help Brave form long-term strategic affiliations with employers.  My other task at the moment is, as Brave plans to rebuild its current website as a major platform for resources and promotional materials, I will help select information that will be posted on the website to maximize the marketing effect, which includes information about employers and strategic partners. We hope that this can assist in Brave’s core mission of helping veterans secure jobs.