Blog 2

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 of how to make our mascot more similar to those. After this, we went back to the other schools and did more research about what their individual handbook says about the responsibilities of their own mascot. Many times, the applicants have to go through a rigorous training process and attend a camp over the summer with many competitions and frequently, an elimination process based on skills and performance. While brainstorming over the past few days, we came up with many ideas and suggestions for the CSU athletic department and how they can improve marketing their mascot. For our first big research day, we worked with a graduate assistant named Jordan. He helped us get started on the project and we were able to bounce ideas off of him and get some help finding resources. While doing this project was a lot of work, it was very helpful to see what their usual tasks look like and why it was important for baseline research like this to be completed.