Finding the balance Dakota Wesleyan student finds personal connections integral to success

By Sam Easter

Lila Gronseth, 21, keeps a busy schedule at Dakota Wesleyan University — Mitchell, South Dakota’s home of the Tigers.

She’s in a mentorship program for local youth. She helps lead a bible study. She works at the Dakota Discovery Museum. For the university’s track and field team, she competes in the shot put, discus, hammer and weight throw.

She’s also graduating this spring after just three years — with a business degree and concentrations in finance and agriculture.

After all that hard work, there’s a lot of lessons she learned in the classroom. But one of the most important came as she connected with friends and mentors around campus.

“You’ll make time for things that are important to you,” she said. “I found that out real quick here. Because just with the professors and everyone I met, they wanted me to do what I love, and they encouraged me to seek things that I loved in life and wanted to pursue.”

Gronseth graduated from Hayfield High School, near Austin, Minn. She grew up on a turkey farm in rural Minnesota, and absorbed all the things that come with growing up in farm country — picking rocks or helping with crops and jumping headlong into 4-H, where Gronseth said she showed “anything that could walk, basically.”

“Those partnerships are very popular,” Mauszycki said. “Students don’t have to decide between Dakota Wesleyan and continued on page 26 continued from page 25

Mitchell Tech anymore, they can just do both and play their sport.”

Gronseth, her advisor said, has a bright future ahead of her.

“She is just really organized, super motivated, never complains. A sponge,” Mauszycki said. “Just wants to learn and learn and learn. It’s great, she’s a joy.”

Gronseth is headed to an internship with Farm Bureau Insurance this summer, where she expects to shadow different jobs within the organization. She’s hoping to work either as an insurance agent or an ag underwriter, she said.

“I started off as an accounting major, but I just didn’t like crunching numbers that much. But I do like the math side of things and just finance and managing all of that,” she said. “But I’m also a people person and I love engaging with people. So I wanted something that kind of balanced between helping with finances and also getting that customer relationship.”

And she said she’s still hanging onto some of the important lessons from Dakota Wesleyan.

“I’m just going to miss all the people that I met here,” she said. “I think it’s very important to have people in your life that are more than just coworkers or people that you see once a week at church. I want to build those relationships that I can contact people every day.”