Erika Francks ’17 is the valedictorian for the Class of 2017. She was actively involved during her time at SCU, serving as a Global fellow, a Global Social Benefit fellow, and a Neighborhood Prosperity Initiative fellow. Francks will start working for Accenture as a consulting analyst in San Francisco in October.

She writes, “I was a Global fellow the summer after my sophomore year and I went to Kolkata, India, to work for the Association for Social and Environmental Development (ASED). ASED is an environmental NGO and they have a program called the Green Rhinos that works with middle school–age students to teach them about biodiversity and the environment and help them develop their own conservation projects. As a Global fellow, my partner Lauren and I mainly made a promotional video for the Green Rhinos program and we helped out with social media and other things as well!

The summer after my junior year I went back to Kolkata as a Global Social Benefit fellow, this time working for ONergy Solar, which is a social enterprise that works to bring renewable energy to both rural and urban areas in east India. They have a huge range of products, including everything from small solar lanterns to solar irrigation pumps to solar microgrids. My partners Carson, Nate, and I wrote case studies on their different products based on observations and interviews from our field research, put together one video to assist ONergy in gaining investment and two promotional videos for customers, revamped their human resources manuals, and compiled a list of potential investors. We went out to rural villages each week to conduct on-camera interviews with customers, employees, and partners of ONergy to better understand the organization’s impact.

Right now I’m backpacking around Iceland with my dad, and I will start working at Accenture in October!”