week of 6/25-6/29

Blog: 6/25-6/29
New Schedule:
Monday 10-4
Tuesday 10-4
Wednesday 10-4
Thursday 10-4
Friday 10-4

Monday: 10:30 am-4 pm 5.5 hrs
Tuesday: 10:00 am-4 pm 6 hrs
Wednesday: Doctor’s appointment, didn’t come in. 3:00-4:00 pm (at home) 1 hr
Thursday: 10:00 am-4 pm 6 hrs
Friday: 10:15am- 4:25 pm 6 hrs, 10 minutes
Total: 24 hrs, 40 minutes

Monday
Today was my first day back from Mississippi. I spent my days creating another spreadsheet for the quota allotment summaries that are now being sent in. My job was to read through them all, and make a note if any of the states wanted to change the number of people they are bringing to the tournament. From this spreadsheet, we will be able to determine exactly how many athletes have been requested, and exactly how many we will have tee times for, basically; how many we are going to have to cut. We also got my Special Olympics email account up and running today. I also began work on a volunteer recruitment packet. We were sent drafts by a gentleman who works at the resort where the tournament is held, and my job was to look over them and see where they could be improved, and compare them to other years. Volunteers are a crucial part of the Special Olympics organization. There would scarcely be a Special Olympics Event if it were not for all the volunteers that give up their time to come to these events.

Tuesday
I continued work on the volunteer recruitment packet. I finished the Volunteer assignment descriptions, and have sent them to my supervisor to look over so we can decide what other changes need to be made. I am now working on the Volunteer Application. I also emailed individuals working with the Golf Course Superintendent’s association of America and the LPGA about getting welcome letters from them to put in the front of our handbooks. By the end of the day, my supervisor emailed back to me with his suggestions.

Wednesday
Due to a doctor’s appointment, I was out of the office today. I spent part of my afternoon working on the Volunteer application and making some corrections and suggestions as to how it could be improved. I later sent my suggestions to the gentleman in charge of volunteers in Florida.

Thursday
I received an email from the gentleman in charge of volunteers at the golf club today. He sent me his drafts of the documents, and told me which of my suggestions he used, and which he did not. He didn't use most of mine and my supervisor's suggestions, which is slightly aggravating. After making a few more suggestions and sending it back to him, we made a phone call to his office to ask him a few specific questions about the document, and then just talk a little bit about the tournament. He said he would look over the other suggestions we made, and send it back to us the next day. He also stated that he had a few suggestions about the volunteer handbook I sent him, and that we could talk about it at at later date.

Friday
We received an email back from the man in charge of volunteers with his final draft of the mailing to be sent out to potential volunteers: he basically ignored every suggestion we made, which is slightly frustrating. We called him again today, and talked a little more about the tournament and recruiting volunteers. I spent most of today working on developing a tentative order of medals and ribbons for the tournament. I had to base my order on orders and winners from previous years. The number of medals we order depends on how many divisions we have, and how many athletes are in each division. In order to come up with the numbers, I had to divide the athletes into tentative divisions, and base my order on those. After I had done this, I developed a spreadsheet with my numbers for each level, and the number of medals and ribbons I would need for each level. In addition, I created a document with all of my notes as to how I divided the divisions and came up with the numbers. I then sent this to Midwest trophy, the company we order from, and am still waiting for a response.

This week, I felt as though my time was a little wasted on some of the things I was doing. It was frustrating to put a lot of time and effort into making something better, for someone to just decided they weren't even going to consider our suggestions and do it his own way, regardless of whether or not our way was actually better.
I was not too far behind when I came back from Mississippi, Craig had started some things while I was away that I finished when I got here. For example, the spreadsheet for the quota allotment summary.

New experiences
I got to sit in on a conference call this week. It was the organization-wide conference call that happens every month. It was interesting to see how Special Olymics North America functions in relation to each of the individual state programs. I also was given the opportunity to talk with some of the people I will be working with when I am down in Florida when we called Mallory, the man in charge of volunteers at the PGA golf club. Also, figuring out the order for the medals and ribbons was a new experience. Learning how businesses and organizations figure out how many of a certain item to order was interesting.

This week I mostly worked with Microsoft Excel and Word. I made a lot of spreadsheets this week, and worked with a lot of Word Documents.

Areas for improvement
I need to work on finishing things a little more quickly, I tend to get caught up in making things perfect, and sometimes it takes me a while to finish things.

Objectives for next week.
Work on the Event handbook. Even though there is a lot I can't do with it right now, there are some things I can do to improve it such as working on the order of documents in the handbook. It is difficult for me to state exactly what I am going to do, because I often don't know what Craig will want me to do until I get there on Monday morning.

Strategies
make better use of my time, stop being such a perfectionist. Work on avoiding distractions in the workplace, and staying focused on the work at hand.

Internship: Wild Dunes Resort, Charleston, SC
Recreation Desk:
The vast majority of this particular job goes something like this: "Good morning/afternoon/evening, thank you for calling Island Adventures, this is Jessica, how can I help you? It often felt as though it should be more like "Good morning/afternoon/evening, thank you for calling Island adventures, this is Jessica, how can I attend to your every whim?, or fix a problem that you seem to think is my fault, even though it isn't, but you are calling to yell at me about anyway?

This job description was probably everyone's least favorite job of all the one's we had to do. If someone else messed up, but they weren't at the desk later in the day, or the next day, someone else inevitably got yelled at for it. The problem was, that we often didn't know how to fix a problem, because we didn't know where the problem started, or whose fault it actually was. Nonetheless, we all became pros at dealing with angry guests as the summer progressed.

That's not to say that everyone who called the desk was in a foul mood, most of them were quite the opposite. Our main job during the day at the recreation desk was to field calls and make reservations for excursions and kids camps. Also, we would ring up and run receipts for all of the people who came to the desk to pay before they were taken on their excursions. On certain days, usually towards the beginning of the week, the desk would be flooded because people were trying to plan their vacation for the next week or two. On other days, like Saturday or Sunday when most people were either checking in or checking out, the desk was typically not as busy.

At the end of the day, whoever happened to be working the desk would work together with the excursion driver to check all the receipts and turn in the day's receipts to the accounting department.