By Abby Grafmyre
June 5, 2025

The Greater Denfeld Foundation (GDF) scholarship recipients are doing amazing things with their scholarship awards. With this profile, we continue the series of introducing the scholarship recipients and sharing their hard work!

Leah Clark, the second recipient introduced in this series, was awarded the Saltwick Scholarship. She is a 2023 graduate of Denfeld High School and a current student at the University of Wisconsin-Superior (UWS), where she is double majoring in Marketing and Finance.

In pursuing Marketing and Finance, she hopes to pursue a career in Operations Management or Financial Analytics. Clark currently works two jobs alongside her academics. She is a Server at a local restaurant and Operations Manager at Forest Hill Cemetery in Woodland. Both jobs enhance her organizational and service management skills, but the cemetery work in particular requires intense precision and accuracy.

Clark’s work at the cemetery is complex and includes helping people at devastating times, analyzing files, and doing on-site grounds work. Her main project is putting the records of over 33,000 people interred at Forest Hill Cemetery since 1880 into an online database. This process utilizes Microsoft Excel and other software she uses at school, allowing her to apply skills to real life experience.

Clark is grateful for the support of the GDF. “The Greater Denfeld Foundation has given me the opportunity to fully prioritize my education without the financial pressure that makes going to college a difficult choice for many,” Clark says. She added that the GDF was a key factor in her choice to attend college, because it gave her the opportunity to pursue her education without overwhelming debt. Recently, she was recognized for being one of the top ten Juniors with a GPA of 3.5 or higher in the UWS School of Business and Economics.

While careers in both Operations Management and Financial Analytics call to her, she is still deciding which to pick. The cemetery job drew her into considering a career in Operations Management because of its uniqueness and freedom. “It’s not the traditional 9 to 5 or a career with a myriad of different projects, so no day is ever quite the same and you’re never stuck in a cubicle,” she says. On the other hand, the desire for a career in Financial Analytics was ignited by analyzing case studies in a finance class last semester. In this class, she reviewed documents like public income statements and balance sheets to diagnose where companies went wrong and designed paths for their recovery.

Clark will begin searching for internships in the fall as she continues her education, but for now she’ll continue gaining experience with her current jobs until the fall semester begins.

Since 1971, the Greater Denfeld Foundation has been dedicated to supporting Duluth Denfeld High School students by providing awards and scholarships for their post-secondary education expenses, along with donations to staff to ensure students have access to a valuable and enriching educational experience.

Abby Grafmyre is a Hauge Scholarship who attends UMD, majoring in English, Communication, and Journalism.