A great semester partnering with Cristo Rey!

School’s out and summer is in full swing here in Kansas City! As our loyal blog readers know, Travois was thrilled to partner with Cristo Rey High School and their Corporate Work Study Program this year. We welcomed Neal Patterson, a sophomore, to the Travois team for the semester.

Neal hit the ground running in January. He impressed us immediately and caught on to our computer programs and systems quickly. His work ethic was fantastic — even while working on tasks that are definitely out of the ordinary for your average high school sophomore (like updating a 700-line excel spread sheet)!

During the five months that Neal worked in the Travois office, he took on many projects with a focus on database updates and helped many of our departments:

  • He worked with our Travois New Markets team to ensure new contacts from industry conferences and on-site visits were added accurately to our database for correspondence on current and potential developments.
  • With Travois First Fridays in full swing, Neal assisted by entering data from each artist and exhibition into our systems. He did a fantastic job getting all of this information entered very timely — in most cases, just days after the exhibit openings.
  • Working with so many tribes, tribal housing authorities, economic development departments and other organizations, our communications team manages A LOT of lists. To help the team, Neal was tasked with a very large data entry assignment (700 lines!). He worked on this extremely helpful and daunting task for weeks — with a smile on his face.

As the school year was winding down, we were ecstatic to learn that Neal was recognized as a Cristo Rey Kansas City Employee of the Year, an honor awarded to only one student per grade! This is a tremendous honor that he should be very proud of. We are definitely proud of Neal here at Travois! We had an ice cream sundae bar to celebrate!

It has been a fantastic semester partnering with Cristo Rey Kansas City and their outstanding Corporate Work Study Program. As Neal’s supervisor, I would like to thank all of the support we received from Ted Koppen, Corporate Work Study director, and Allison Pointer, associate director. We look forward to keeping this partnership going in future semesters!

We appreciate all of your hard work, Neal! It’s been a great semester!