For my Internship project I was given the idea from my mentor to create a trafficking schedule that would measure the amount of people in each studio of the South Bay YMCA facility for each hour of the day that I was working. I began with simply making a spreadsheet of all the hours that the Y is open for each day, then inserting the classes that were being held within the certain hours. This was for me to know which studios were being in use at certain hours and which ones weren’t. After doing the class schedules, I began to conduct hourly head counts around the facility. I would go inside each room and count the people inside so I would be able to keep record for my final project. I was planning on creating three types of different graphs. An Hourly Traffic by Day graph, Weekly Trafficking Flow graph, and a Daily Traffic Count graph. My mentor told me I would be the first one in the whole entire South Bay YMCA facility to ever create a trafficking schedule and would be the beginning of a long term annual yearly project. My project was designed to help out the marketing director which was my mentor Tina Medina so she can use the data for her marketing benefits. By me creating a schedule of the trafficking flow of the YMCA my mentor would have an advantage of knowing which days are the busiest and which days need more improvement. This will allow her to start new events for the non-busy days and have the YMCA always having people there. My project will also benefit the staff at the Y because they will be aware of which days and hours they will be most crowded so they know what to expect, and maybe call in more staff so that the reception staff won’t be overwhelmed with a lot of people. People who attend the Y will also be informed with this information too, members and non-members will be able to use these graphs to get an idea of what time they might consider coming in making the Y facility more spread out on the capacity by the hours and days. I feel really proud to say that I have made history at the South Bay Family YMCA and I will be remembered by many staff. My day consisted of coming at different hours of the day, conducting headcounts every hour, and helping almost every single staff in the building. When the day was really busy I would be in charge of managing the front kiosk signing people in and answering any questions they had. It was a pretty cool experience because I got to meet a lot of new people and became really familiar with how the front reception works. One of the best experiences I had was getting to meet this really cool guy named Leo who helped me out sign up for these Lifeguarding classes/ Tryouts for the YMCA, hoping for me to stay with them at their branch. Some days I would be at the teen center collaborating with other students on events that my friend and I were hosting. At one point we were assigned to create and plan out a Father’s day event for family’s and have them all bond together with arts and crafts and fun little games that we came up with. The really cool thing about this event is that we tried contacting Home Depot to partner up with the Y so they can host a children’s workshop, having all the kids build something that was not to complicated but still very cool to be proud of and have a blast. Everything worked out pretty well, we reached out to the main person in charge of the workshops but we never got to meet her because she was too busy, but we wrote her very professional letter with all the information we were going to tell her in person. They never replied back and we even showed up to the Home Depot location a couple times but we never got a reply. Even though it didn’t go as we planned it was the effort that counted and the skills we learned for us to outreach to other professional company’s. I also got to make calls for one of the campaigns we were running that month that was called Hop the Gap. Hop the Gap was basically a campaign of donations so that kids could achieve more this summer by providing them with camp, swim lessons, academics and more. My job was to call member/ nonmembers and ask them if they were interested in donating any amount of money for the cause. It was really scary at first how I explained in my previous posts but I got a hang of it eventually and before I knew it I was marketing over the phone. I was only able to get one person to donate money but it was still a pretty cool learning experience. I would have late shifts also so I got to experience best of both worlds at the Y. One week I would only have a morning schedule so I can collect the data for my project and then have closing hours for the same reason. I really enjoyed the late shifts because I became really close to the staff members and it was the time where the staff would actually teach me things and how they work instead of just giving me tasks to do without me knowing why. This project was really important to me because I will be able to use the skills I learned to create the graphs using spread sheets for multiple purposes in my future life. I was really lost in the beginning when my mentor would just verbally explain things to me, but as the days past I began to get a better understanding of what she wanted and everything would just be lining up for me. I will be able to use this internship experience for any future job references I need because I know they will all put in a good word for me since I was always trying to be an awesome intern! The only advice I can give to whoever is reading this is, whenever you are assigned something you don’t know how to do or feel less than everyone else, don’t be afraid to take a chance and be wrong. We all mistakes but we have to learn from our experiences. Rome wasn’t built in a day and the more you work and put effort towards something you will have really awesome results.
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