Although I had already gotten the first internship, I still had to find where to do the big one. Splore was 100 hours, basically 3 times a week for a few hours, for like 6 weeks. The big one was full time for one entire semester. The idea behind the full time internship was, of course, to do it as a job, or to get your foot in the door, and that way once you graduated you had a full time job lined-up. Well, I was running out of time and I was looking for jobs and/or internships. NO ONE WOULD TAKE ME EVEN FOR FREE. It seemed that nobody even needed volunteers at their place. (WHO wouldn't want volunteers???) Consider that this was when the economy was in the hole (not that it's not in the hole anymore..). The point is no one was hiring, nor taking volunteers. Not finding a full time internship by January did not only mean that I couldn't graduate on time, but it would put me out of status with immigration since I had not gotten my permanent residency yet, so I was still technically an international student, and as one I was supposed to enroll full time again in January, or lose my status and be deported. So on my way to follow up with a job I had applied for in Sandy, still not knowing the area very well, I ended up at Noah's, a "revolutionary" event center in Utah. Well, Noah's was not unknown to me, I actually knew exactly what it was. We even went on a tour of the facility they have in Lindon with one of my event classes with BYU semesters before. So I had known of Noah's for a while, and people kept asking me when I was looking for an internship "well, you are looking for something in the event industry, why don't you try Noah's?" and I never had an answer. It felt like Noah's was "too good to be true," so I never even tried. I believed it was out of my reach. Well, they have another facility in South Jordan, 3 miles from our apartment in Sandy.
Back to the day when I ran into the building, this happened at the beginning of December, and in my worst clothes ever, wearing SNEAKERS with jeans and a sweater that I walked in with a resume in my hand and asked to speak to the event coordinator. (Do you like how I am dramatizing the story?) She happened to be there, and we went into a boardroom and chatted for a while. She said she liked my resume, and she said that her current intern was finishing her internship in a week, and that she was going to need someone after that. She had owned her own event planning and floral studio in Park City for 10 years, and now Noah's had hired her company to do events in the building. So she gave me the internship right there, and told me to come back in January when my internship started, so I did. Woohoo! I was not going to be deported. (And I was happy for many other reasons too, not just that.)
So I started officially in January. There was a huge event at the end of January, it was actually a Christmas corporate party for Fairchild Semiconductors, and I made that my senior project. They rented out the entire building for 2 days; they sent half of their employees one day and half the next day. This was a theme event: we did 3 different themes on the 3 different floors: Hello to Hollywood, Viva Las Vegas, and New York New York. Here are some pictures:
So the internship requirements changed in the middle of the semester, and instead of doing one entire semester, it was now an hour requirement, and by that time I was going to complete my hours by the end of that same week. This happened in March. My internship technically ended on a Friday and by the next Monday I was hired full time. It was perfect timing. So I have already been working full time with real pay for over a month before I actually graduate this April. Happy times.
0 comments:
Post a Comment