JuliaSlabeHawkenProjects2022 (RachelMullenHawkenProjects2022)

During the final days of my senior project, I had the great opportunity to shadow a few members of the athletic training department. I spent a few hours shadowing a man named Rich, who was the head athletic trainer for CSU athletes. He has been working at CSU for the past 18 years. I was able to ask him questions about his daily schedule, the athletes, how he decided to become a trainer, and everything else his job entails. He gave me a very in-depth tour of the athletic campus, including the training areas and locker rooms. On this tour, I met the rest of his team and got the chance to talk to them about their specific roles. CSU has 17 athletic teams and there are 8 athletic trainers. Each trainer is designated to look after 1-3 teams and will specifically focus on those athletes. CSU also has a very close relationship with the Cleveland Clinic and they send over primary care and orthopedic fellows twice a week to take a closer look at students when they have a more serious issues. R...

Annie and I spent the majority of this week doing tasks around the office. The biggest goal we achieved was being able to clean out a closet that has not been touched since 1990… it was super fun. Just kidding. While this may not have been the most joyous task, it was nice to be helpful and I think the people in the office were very appreciative that we were able to do this for them. I did not really mind this task because I knew going into this internship that we would have to do some grunt work at some point. We needed to clean it because there was an event at CSU the prior week that used really nice balloons and they wanted to be able to reuse the balloons and store them. We had to flatten them all out and take the helium out of them, and then fold them so it was easier to put them into storage. After they were all sorted out, we started on the closet by taking everything out and putting it into the hallway. Once it was empty, we swept the floors and did happen to find a family of d...

At the end of the second week, we spent a good amount of our time shifting from research projects to mainly just completing necessary tasks around the office. To finish up this week, we were finally able to take a tour of the entire campus. On the first day of the internship, we received an introductory small tour around the Wolstein Center because that is where our work was located, however, we were only able to see the rest of the athletic buildings today. It was really nice to have the opportunity to see all of the athletic facilities and was actually interesting because I have been to CSU countless times but was shown many places that I did not know existed. This tour was also a great chance to speak more with the other intern from a different high school and a Graduate Assistant named Jordan we worked with when our mentor was busy. While this day had less work for us to do, we got a chance to sit down with Jordan and learn more about the progression of his career. He attended CSU ...

At the beginning of the second week of my project, I shifted gears from the Mascot research project to another research project. Annie and I were tasked with researching group outing events at Minor League Baseball events. The bulk of many jobs in the office we work in is to plan smoothly running athletic sporting events. However, when they are not running the event, there are reflecting and planning things and ideas to make them better. This time of year is mostly for planning and meetings because there are no active athletic competitions going on. So, my mentor is in the process of teaching us how they market games to families and students. While she has to run the games, her job also entails making sure people attend, buy tickets, have fun, and come back. This is why I was assigned to do research about Minor League Baseball teams. These teams are able to incorporate many different opportunities for big groups like special seating, fun games, throwing the first pitch on the field, or...

During the first week of my senior project, I have had the opportunity to meet almost the entire staff of the athletic department at CSU and it has been super interesting to learn about all of their roles. During this time of year, all of the different sports seasons are now completed so most of the staff's time is spent having meetings and planning out what the next school year will look like for the athletic department. There are about 12 people working in this office and most of them are in different sections of work. A few are coaches, such as the men's lacrosse coach, men's tennis coach, and men's basketball coach. There are members of the sales, communications, and finance departments that we were able to talk to and understand more about what their jobs entail. Almost everyone in the office is very flexible and they all work on a myriad of projects to benefit the entire department. Our mentor's responsibilities are also very versatile. Over the past few days,...

Within the first week, I have undoubtedly already learned a lot from this internship. For the past few days, Annie and I have been working on a project to revamp the Cleveland State school mascot, a Viking named Magnus. We spent a lot of time researching the mascot and comparing CSU’s program to many other universities, including, the Atlantic Sun Conference, the Atlantic 10 Conference, the Northeastern League, the Horizon League, and various professional sports mascots. We looked at every single school within these leagues and learned about their mascot and how their programs are successful. After spending lots of time researching other schools, we then shifted our focus to the history of CSU sports and mascots. We researched the old mascot figures and how the new ones are now compensated, their training schedules, how the application process works, and what is required of them. We compared the CSU commonalities to those of schools in other conferences and came up with our own ideas o...

For the next 3 weeks, I will be working as an intern for Cleveland State University. I am going to be working in their Athletic Department. I will be interning with Annie Gunning and we have two mentors. One is the Assistant Athletic Director, Marketing and Engagement and the other is Deputy Athletic Director, External Operations. Honestly, I am not certain about what our day-to-day schedules will look like, but I believe we will be shadowing Leslie and Chelsea and learning about what it takes to run a smoothly operating athletic department at a university. We will have a stronger direction toward finance and learning about the business side of the department. Personally, I have never been very interested in business or finance, so I thought it would be best to take this 3 week's opportunity to learn something new, especially in such an immersive experience. As I will probably never have this chance again, I want to make the most out of it because I will be focusing on science topi...