Before this summer, Gracie Carroll \u201925 would not have called herself a soccer fan.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot even a little bit,\u201d said the communication studies<\/a> major and visual strategy<\/a> minor. \u201cI played in middle school, but I don\u2019t know much about soccer. I didn\u2019t know the lingo.\u201d<\/p>\n But these days, thanks to her summer internship<\/a>, Carroll frequently finds herself on the field at Paladin Stadium with a United Soccer League League One team, snapping pics and live-tweeting the matches. With the Greenville Triumph<\/a> and its associated pre-professional women\u2019s club, the Greenville Liberty<\/a>, she has been getting on-the-pitch training not only in soccer lingo but also in the skills she plans to take with her after graduation into a marketing career.<\/p>\n Team members and staff of the Greenville, South Carolina-based soccer clubs were extremely helpful to her and the interns from other schools, Carroll said, explaining particulars of the sport like the offside rule and red cards versus yellow cards.<\/p>\n Building on prior experience as a social media intern<\/a> for Furman University Admissions, marketing director for the Chi Omega sorority and vice president of public relations for the Furman University Student Activities Board , Carroll\u2019s duties this summer included helping maintain the club\u2019s Twitter and TikTok<\/a> accounts, editing and updating its website and writing email newsletters. She\u2019s become adept in MailChimp and WordPress, software tools she expects to encounter frequently in her chosen profession.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve learned how to professionally convey an idea over social media,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve also gotten a lot better at organization and scheduling \u2013 the whole name of the game in social media is that you have to time things out.\u201d<\/p>\n She also gained an appreciation of targeting and tailoring messages to reach different audiences.<\/p>\n \u201cI do different things when I\u2019m tweeting as the Triumph<\/a> versus the Liberty<\/a> versus writing a newsletter about the kids\u2019 camp<\/a>,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She discovered the internship during an Express Paladin Career Trek<\/a> visiting professional sports teams in Greenville. During the tour, sponsored by the Malone Center for Career Engagement<\/a>, Carroll got a chance to network with a senior executive for the Triumph, and she followed up with the organization at a later Malone Center Career and Internship Fair.<\/p>\n Structured internship courses are included in many of Furman\u2019s academic departments, noted Janna Pennington<\/a>, a lecturer in communication studies and instructor of Carroll\u2019s internship course. Such opportunities provide a clear example of The Furman Advantage<\/a>, an educational framework that provides every student an individualized educational pathway and opportunities for high-impact learning experiences, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cGracie has gotten the chance to apply her knowledge and see how marketing and communications works in the real world,\u201d said Pennington. \u201cEmployers are looking for students who not only have knowledge but also know how to apply it in a professional setting.\u201d<\/p>\n In the coming academic year, Carroll will be back on the sidelines, reporting live on Furman Paladin games for her Sports Reporting course. Going from soccer rookie to ringer in the course of one summer has made her confident that she can pivot quickly to drive toward wherever the next goal is.<\/p>\n \u201cMoving forward, I definitely will keep more of an open mind when looking at different job opportunities,\u201d she said. \u201cI was hesitant to interview for the soccer club internship, because I thought, \u2018Oh my gosh, what if they ask me about soccer stuff? I have no idea what I\u2019m talking about.\u2019 But now, I know that if you just put in a little extra time and effort, it won\u2019t be as hard as you think it\u2019s going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A summer internship with a professional soccer club was a pitch-perfect opportunity for Gracie Carroll \u201925 to prepare for a marketing career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":26881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,63,51,58],"tags":[1787,1786,772,1131],"class_list":["post-26879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asian-studies","category-career-services","category-communication-studies","category-internships","tag-greenville-liberty","tag-greenville-triumph","tag-internships","tag-soccer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Tools and tricks of the trade<\/h3>\n
From rookie to ringer<\/h3>\n