How the Furman Advantage Shaped My Summer

Hello, my name is Gracie Carroll, and I am a junior from Aiken, South Carolina! I am a Communication Studies major with a minor in Visual Strategy. This past summer, I did an internship with the Greenville Triumph Soccer Club. I was hired on as their Digital Marketing and Social Media intern, which aligned very well with my career goals, as I hope to one day work in marketing and design! Because of this internship, I had the opportunity to be a Furman summer fellow!

Furman is one of just a few schools in the country that provides funding and a chance for weekly reflections for summer internships and research projects that would otherwise have little to no pay. My internship with the Triumph was unpaid, but thanks to this fellowship program, I was able to receive funding and live on campus for the duration of the summer!

To be considered a summer fellow, you must work full time (at least 35 hours/week for 8 weeks) with an organization or in a research position. I went into the Triumph’s office, located in downtown Greenville, every weekday from 10-5 and worked home match days that usually went from around 4-10pm.

Working with The Team

My day-to-day tasks included managing and posting on the team’s various social media accounts, creating content calendars, editing website content, writing up match previews and updating team stats, designing weekly newsletters, and more! Going into this experience, I didn’t know much about the game of soccer or soccer lingo, but now I would consider myself to be pretty well-versed in that realm! I learned so much about what it takes to successfully manage a professional sports team, how to collaborate on social media ideas with a team, how to operate various new software, and how to cater content to an audience I didn’t know much about. Match days were my favorite! The Triumph plays in Paladin Stadium, so even though I obviously am not on the team, I still felt like I had the home field advantage!

Before each game, I would go down to the field to capture pictures and videos of player warmups and other activities the club was hosting for fans. During the match, I got to sit up in the press box with my fellow interns and supervisors and live tweet the happenings of the match. At the final whistle, I would write up a match recap story that would then be sent to multiple local news outlets and posted to the Triumph website. The fast-paced environment of the match was so exciting and helped me to learn how to be adaptable, efficient, and focused on the tasks at hand.

My time with the Triumph taught me so much about myself and helped shape my future career path, and I would not have had the opportunity to work there without the perks of being a summer fellow!

 

Thank you Furman, and go Triumph!!