Submitted Photo Minot State University student Taryn Faul works at the ADM Velva plant. She was an intern there for several months. Now she is grain origination specialist.

Taryn Faul was the grain merchandising and origination intern at the ADM Velva plant for several months. On Jan. 9, she began full-time work as grain origination specialist at the Velva office.

From Max, she graduated from Minot State University with a double major in finance and marketing. She’s now working on her master’s degree in management at MSU.

Faul started her internship at Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) on July 1. The challenges and experiences of the job enabled her to consider a career in the agriculture industry.

Founded in 1902, ADM is an American multinational food processing and commodities trading corporation headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Faul met with Randy Conway, director of Severson Entrepreneurship Academy, to discuss potential internships. They talked about ADM as a good fit for Faul, so she reached out to the Velva plant manager in April 2022.

Once Faul got the internship, ADM flew her out to Decatur, Illinois, for a plant tour alongside 117 other interns working all over the country.

“We got to fly down there and spend a week in Decatur, touring the plant and learning a lot about ADM while going around the different departments that they have,” she said. “It was nice to see what everyone else did, to meet everyone, and to learn where they’re stationed out of.”

At the start of the internship, Faul found that many of the materials she covered in her marketing and finance classes transferred over and helped her accommodate to the demands of the position.

“It’s really fun to apply what you learn in your classes to real-world situations,” she said. “I had a lot of the base knowledge that I needed for the job from those classes going into it and then the specifics, those I learned on the job.”

Faul reaches out to farmers to set up sales, and she is also responsible for hedging the risk once ADM buys canola from those farmers. Some of those job-specific tasks became welcomed challenges that Faul overcame during her first month.

“At college I worked at banks. I did not have experience in the agriculture industry,” she said. “I learned so much at the beginning of the internship about the terminology they used for different products and the way certain financial procedures work in agriculture as opposed to other industries.”

Faul also had some highlights from the first month. For example, she visited the Minneapolis branch.

“My manager let me and one of my coworkers visit there for a week,” she said. “I got to tour the plant and learn more about the International Canola Exchange. It was all very interesting to me.”