My first week

Schedule: For the first few weeks of my internship, I will be going to summer school in the morning, and going to my internship in the afternoons. Until June 8th, my schedule will be as follows:

Monday: 12:45-5:00
Tuesday: 12:45-5:00
Wednesday: 12:45-5:00
Thursday: 12:45-5:00
Friday: 12:45-5:00

When my summer school classes are over, I will update my schedule.

My internship is with Special Olympics North America, located in Raleigh, North Carolina. My internship will involve the planning and execution of a golf tournament in Port St. Lucie, Florida. The tournament will be in September, at which time my internship will be over. My supervisor's name is Craig Pippert, he is the Senior Manager for Sport Development at Special Olympics North America. His primary responsibility as of right now is preparing for the golf tournament. At other times in the year, he works on the execution of other major events for Special Olympics. For example, the world games, and various state-sponsored events. Melanie Ferlito and Greg Epperson, the other employees at the office have many of the same responsibilities as Craig. They are each responsible for planning different events at different times throughout the year. My responsibilities include developing registration packets, volunteer handbooks, and event handbooks to be sent out to all involved with the tournament. In addition, I will be involved with communicating with individuals at the tournament site. This will help me with developing various handbooks to be sent to the people attending the event.
Most of the events that occur with Special Olympics occur within the school year, because many programs rely on the school system to transport athletes. However, currently the office I am working in is involved with World Games, which are hosted this year in China, I believe. My supervisor also recently left for California to help with their state games.

I began my first week this Monday. For most of this week, I worked on my computer developing the registration packet and volunteer handbook. This involved looking at information from past tournaments, updating and occassionally throwing information out. And putting it together. There is a lot of information to be updated and thrown out. A lot of it will not be able to be done until we receive updated lists of officials, volunteers, and athletes. My work this week specifically involved working with Excel and developing a workbook to save the information we receive from the various state programs as to how many athletes they are sending, and what level they will be competing at. In addition, I used Microsoft Word for a lot of things, like developing the volunteer handbooks and registration packets.
This job is not like many others I have had in that I am personally responsible for many things, in the past have had a much larger hand in what I did. In this job, I am permitted to do a lot of things myself, and given a certain amount of flexibility to do them the way I want to.
Most of my work this week involved using Microsoft Works, which I have a lot of experience using in the past. I need to become more familiar with some of tools used for formatting documents in some of the programs, however I have used all fo the Microsoft programs at some point in the past.

Though this internship is in large part an office position, I am still enjoying it. I am getting a lot of valuable experience working in an office environment, and with working with individuals who are older than I am. This internship is giving me the opportunity to be involved with the development of a major tournament, and will hopefully open many doors to me in the future. Though this job will undoubtedly be not as much fun as my last internship in Charleston, I am still looking forward to finishing it and gaining a valuable experience.

To improve my performance I need to familiarize myself a little more with using some of the tools for formatting in the Microsoft programs, and become a little more verbal in my inter-office communication.

Objectives for coming week:
1. Finish Volunteer Handbook and Registration Packet
2. Contact State programs about their athletes
3. Finish Excel workbook and confirm number of athletes.
4. Begin work on Event Handbook

Finishing the Volunteer Handbook and registration packet will require me to spend a lot of time away from work working on the documents, as I will be spending a lot of time this week on the phone contacting representatives from different state programs. My supervisor is out of town this week, and he has left me the responsibility of making courtesy calls to state programs and reminding them that the deadline for registration is coming up. Finishing the Excel Workbook will require me to make sure that I contact everyone that needs to be contacted, and record the information.

Internship: Wild Dunes, Charleston, SC

In my first week of my internship last summer at Wild Dunes Resort in Charleston, South Carolina we went through an intense week of training and preparation for the summer ahead. We spent anywhere between six and nine hours a day at desks in a classroom like atmosphere learning about the resort and our responsibilities. Every afternoon/evening we took a break and participated in some sort of activity such as jet skiing, sailing, or kayaking as a sort of team-building activity. This also allowed us to experience many of the excursions and trips that we would be selling to our guests throughout the summer. One thing that was stressed throughout the summer was upselling, and these experiences allowed us to tell guests about the trips, and a first-hand account of the experience is a major selling point for many people. At the end of the week, we were given a "test" to see how much we had absorbed from the week of studying, and on Saturday afternoon, five of us, myself included, began work a day before everyone else.
Throughout the week, we learned about our responsibilities during the summer. We were responsible for working at children's camps, working as a cashier at a gift shop, making reservations for the various trips/ camp's offered by the resort, driving guests to and from excursions at the Marina, and running activities on the Grand Pavilion, the boardwalk at the center of the Resort.

This internship differs greatly from my internship at Special Olympics in that I was not the only intern in the organization. In addition, there was an intense training period at the resort, whereas at Special Olympics there was no real training period, I was just put into the job with little instruction. The nature of the job differs greatly, in that Wild Dunes was a much more hands-on experience, where I got to become personally involved with the guests, and Special Olympics is largely an office job, even though I will be involved with the athletes at the tournament.