Pittsburgh Penguins Internship - Week 3

This week was another with the Pens on the road, but the interns still went in on Tuesday for the Spring 2019 Internship Orientation breakfast.

Basically, this serves as a brief training course for all of the interns - throughout all of the different departments - since we are all now part of the organization.

We began in the RMU conference room for breakfast with executives from around the organization and a chance for networking with those executives from the different departments.

After breakfast, there was a session to teach us how to embody the Pens' mission and values. Basically, we learned that all departments focus first and foremost on service and bridging the gap between fans' expectations and the actual experience of the fan at the game.

Following the session, the interns went into the Pens locker room to get professional pictures taken for our websites/professional headshot and then we were free to take pictures with the locker nameplates that they had made for each of us.

Overall, this week was focused on training, but the Pens did so in an interesting way that brought all of the interns together from the different departments and it was actually a lot of fun.

Pittsburgh Penguins Internship - Week 2

Of my three weeks at the Penguins, this past week has been my favorite so far - and there weren't even any games at home.

The Pens are on a VERY long road trip followed by the All-Star break, so things at PPG Paints Arena have been a little dull. (Cirque du Soleil is there right now though and some of the performers warm up by our office so that was pretty cool to see.)

Because of our long downtime, Jason and Emma (our boss and the GA) had us all come in when we were available this week for some office work and other things that the media relations world entails but aren't seen as often.

Thursday was definitely the most interesting day in the office so far. The interns that were there got to  go through Sidney Crosby's fan mail and respond to it. There were kids who view Sid has their hero, moms writing on behalf of kids, birthday and wedding invitations, women who were in love with him, and people asking to have cards or other items signed.

My personal favorite came from Sid's former teacher who co-authored a children's book and fashioned a character after him.

Friday was my favorite day of the internship to date. Jason took the interns up to the club level and gave us the ins and outs of how to write media releases (specifically in the style that the Penguins do things obviously, but tips and tricks to take with us into our future endeavors). Following our rundown with Jason, he gave us a hypothetical situation to write a media release about. Then we emailed our releases to Jason and he gave us critiques and suggestions on how to make it better.

I love writing and doing things of the sort, so Friday was definitely on the top of my list for the internship so far.

Pittsburgh Penguins Internship - Week 1

My first week as a Media Relations Intern for the Pittsburgh Penguins was technically my second week as an intern - just the first week that we were not being trained and we were on our own for games.

There were four interns hired this semester: myself, another Allison (a Pitt student), JT (Pitt), and Chris, who is a graduate student from Michigan.

This week we only had one game, and it was the first that we were without the interns or game day staff training us on the game day activities that will be our duties for the rest of the season - it was also a 5-3 win against the Florida Panthers. (We are 2-1 as an internship class so far.)

We got the rundown on how to print stats, where to run them, which Pittsburgh media personnel and Penguins management to run them to first, how to take game notes and which stats to look up during the game, and how to get sound from the locker room post-game.

Overall, we will be doing a lot of learning over this week and next week to get into a groove, but for now, we will be waiting another two-ish weeks for the next home game by going in for an hour here or there and getting things ready for the span of games coming up.

This is basically my dream internship and I am so excited to see where it leads me in the future and what else we get to do this semester.