Going Beyond the “Intern” Title

This is posted as part of our Summer Intern Blog Series. Be sure to come back each week as interns from around the country share their summer experiences with us!

By: Todd Rogers, @Todd_TTU

As I have talked about in previous blog posts, this summer I have been spending a lot of my time working on a project to move the current club sport program at ACU under the athletics.

Myself and another one of the members of the athletics department here at ACU have spent the past month both researching in to club sports as well as creating official documents and spreadsheets to be proposed to other senior administrators on campus as well as the president himself.

With the audience that all this research was going to, it was clear that it was no small project and that moving club sports under athletics has people all over campus fired up and excited for the potential of it.

This past week though was the first step in the whole project finally coming together. After spending time creating a formal proposal, a job description, and a 5 year forecast for the program, we were finally able to give an initial presentation and proposal to several leaders across campus. Even though the documents still need to be presented to the president himself as well as other leaders across campus, the meeting was an awesome experience for me!

Although I am just an intern, there I was sitting in a meeting with high profile members of the university such as the Chief Enrollment Officer and the Chief Financial Officer just to name a few. There was certainly a lot of pressure with so many high profile people in the room but the meeting went just about as well as it could have.

That meeting this past week really summed up one of the many reasons I am so blessed to be able to intern here at ACU and I’m thankful every day that I ended up here at ACU. While I may not be interning at the biggest or the most high profile athletics department in the country, I feel confident that the experience and the relationships that I am building here at ACU compare to none other that I could receive in an internship.

With this club sports project, not only have I gotten the chance to work on something I have previous experience in and that I can really contribute to, I also get the chance to see the project through and participate in these meetings where the decisions are really made. I get the chance to do more than just work and to pass it on to someone else. I know I’ve said it before but most days I truly don’t feel like an intern here and the trust I am given from the rest of the members of the department reflects that. It is an incredible feeling. As I continue to work on this project and it continues to work its way up the rungs to finally being completed, I am excited to see how it all turns out.

While my internship will be coming to an end before I know it, there are still a lot of exciting things I’ll be looking forward to. In just two weeks time, the Wildcat Club Caravan will be leaving on a 5 city 4 day tour and I’ll be tagging along and helping out. and I can’t wait to share my experience during this event.