By Michael Knight | Reporter
This summer was certainly an eventful one for me. As a sports strategy & sales major in the Business School, I was able to land an internship with Baylor Athletics selling tickets, such as season passes to football and mini packages.
Throughout the whole experience, there were three key sections of the internship that really stuck out to me, and each of them taught me a different lesson that I will carry on into my career in sports.
For the first main part of the internship, I focused on making quite a few phone calls a day, most of the times 50 or more every week. My bosses were incredible at helping me with my confidence selling, and I got a true taste of what my career will be like.
It certainly wasn’t easy, though, which is why the main lesson I learned from it was diligence. Making that many calls was difficult and I needed to stick with it, and I’m glad I did. I ended up making over 750 phone calls during this time period, many of them leading to eventual sales.
The next section of the internship found our team working at each of the 10 orientations for incoming freshmen. This, in particular, was really a fun and interesting time in my summer as I got face-to-face contact with a lot of new students, welcoming them to Baylor. It also provided the opportunity to sell season tickets to their parents interested in visiting the freshmen during the year.
Becoming innovative was the main lesson I learned through the many orientation sessions. For the first half of them, we wrote down names of interested parents with pen and paper, entering them in to the computer when we arrived back at the office (and often staying late to do so).
For the second half, though, I came up with a plan to have laptops at our booth and have interested people sign up through an online form that fed directly onto our system. This saved us the time of manually entering in these names and gave us more time to sell tickets. Being innovative is a huge part of being successful in a career, so I am glad that I got experience with that this summer.
Lastly, things got interesting in the last main part of the summer. By then, both of the bosses had left their jobs here at Baylor for great opportunities elsewhere. While our department of interns was still being watched over, we were left without a ton of supervision at times.
That’s when I really learned to be a self-starter and self-manager, the last main lesson. Even though we could’ve done nothing all day, we decided to continue to sell to these freshmen parents leads that we got and find new ways to do it.
The result was a ton of more experience in selling from the alternative of sitting around. This valuable experience will be huge as I enter my career with a sports franchise.
The three lessons that I took away from this summer are some that I will always remember. If you are looking to make an impact in your job, be sure to be diligent in your work, innovative in how you do things and a self-starter when it may seem tough to be one.
