I think I’ve sat down more than a dozen times to write this blog post and I still can’t seem to find the words to describe how amazing, awesome, incredible, overwhelming, educational, influential and absolutely chaotic my summer has been. But, considering I get on ice in TWO DAYS I decided to get my butt in gear and get some semblance of my thoughts up so that you can get a recap of the past three months and so that we can move on to the most wonderful time of the year!
Team Red, crushing challenges and waves
Back in June, I mentioned an opportunity at an once-in-a-lifetime internship with Adecco Group, the world’s largest provider of HR solutions. The internship sounded incredible, and I knew it would open doors and excite me for life after sport, as well as pay very well. I won’t lie- after a summer of searching for job after job, I had put all of my eggs into this basket, a risky move that is not characteristic of any decisions I make (hello, Type-A Planner anybody?).
But, I knew that this internship was what I really wanted to do and figured I would arrive at the boot-camp, be myself, meet some awesome people and hopefully impress the judges and executives. Little did I know, the boot camp would be the start of one heck of a journey. As someone who lives my life in a state of mass chaos, I thought I was prepared for what was to come.
Boy, was I over-confident.
I’m gonna miss this crazy kids! This was after finishing our final presentations!
I headed down to Adecco’s headquarters in Jacksonville, FL around mid-July. The boot camp was a week long, and was designed to make us think on our feet and push us outside of our comfort zones, while allowing each of the finalists an opportunity to shine. A huge shout-out goes out to the individuals on the Marketing team who made this thing come into fruition and who chose six other insanely amazing, interesting and smart finalists. These ladies and gent’s are seriously the coolest and spent months planning the boot camp, which from the eyes of the finalists, went off without a hitch. The boot camp never felt like a “competition” and the seven of us were able to bond immediately.
To Bailey, Joslin, Kelly, Terry, Daquawn and Steven– I am SO glad I had the opportunity to meet you and bond so closely in just a week! I loved getting to know each of your personalities and I am so thankful that we had each other to make it through some of those challenges (like that business case study, amiright?). I can’t wait to see where the future takes all of us!
Adecco Group North America CEO Bob Crouch and I before our WJXT interview!
The chaos definitely continued after Adecco Group North America CEO Bob Crouch announced that I had been named the CEO for 1 Month winner. I had paperwork to sign and schedules to coordinate for my official start date two days later. I flew back to the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, NY to re-pack, sort out my workouts and prepare!
And this is the part where I get stuck in completing this blog post. I mean, how does one go about detailing this experience—without writing a novel?
In the interests of letting you all get back to your regular scheduled programming, I won’t go into detail about all of the incredible places I traveled or the fantastic people that I met (<–I could spend days on that one!) so I’ll let the following blogs help on that regard. I was so honored that Business Insider picked me up for a four-blog series to recap and detail my life on the job. This made it incredibly easy for my family, friends and interested parties to follow along!
On top of the Empire State building with a few of the awesome people I met along the way!
I do want to extend a heart-felt thank you to everyone that I met along the way–I can’t thank you enough for your kindness, your welcoming attitude and your generosity. You all made me feel incredibly special and valued, and as an intern walking into such a crazy opportunity, I can’t thank you enough for the time you took from your busy schedules to teach me the trade.
So, as the title of this blog suggests, the past few months have been total chaos, but this internship was quite literally the coolest, craziest and best experiences of my life (and trust me, I’ve done some pretty gnarly stuff!). I learned so much about myself; my strengths, my weaknesses and my goals for my future.
And now, it’s time for the most exciting part of the year…getting back on ice! Stay tuned during the next several weeks as we knock the rust off, get back to sliding and start the team selection process. I’ll be sure to update along the way and keep you all in the loop as we get started on the 2015-2016 season!
push from the top 