Miscellaneous Work Updates

Today marks the end of my 5^th week of my internship. That means I only have four weeks left…so time continues to fly. Everything has been going well, today I will be going to Gilbert Gateway which is a marketplace in Mesa near the Polytechnic campus to do my last area of vendor outreach. Previously Rebecca and I have outreached to Tempe Marketplace, Mill Avenue (in Tempe), and Downtown Phoenix. I have been following up with all of our new contacts in the past couple of weeks trying to get more committed sponsors.

Over the past five weeks I have contacted a lot of vendors over the phone, but also have had some in person meetings with the following places:

·         Sunflower Farmer’s Market

·         Bank of America

·         GPA Insurance

·         Wal-Mart

·         Swift Charities

·         Windmill Suites

·         City of Chandler

·         Verizon Wireless

I have really enjoyed these meetings, and they have all become committed sponsors to ASU Fall Welcome Events.

I had a meeting yesterday at Wells Fargo Arena where the check-in process takes place along with the vendor Welcome Zone opportunity on the fall move-in days. This meeting was to discuss the setup along the concourse and outside of all different stations; a lot went into finalizing plans, mostly to make sure that nothing was going against fire code. I am currently working on mapping out where each of our 28 vendors and counting will have their tables setup for the Welcome Zone.

I have two more training sessions left on the next couple of Mondays, and I am looking forward to them. They are Spirit, Pride & Tradition and Social Entrepreneurship.

So these are just some miscellaneous work updates…but everything is going great! Whoo! Kelly is visiting me this weekend, and I am very excited! We are going to San Diego and going to the Zoo/the beach. We are going to have a lot of fun! This is by far the most traveling I have ever done…so it’s pretty cool! Grand Canyon last weekend, San Diego this weekend…awesome!

GRAND CANYON AND SEDONA WEEKEND!

The other interns and I went to the Grand Canyon and visited the city of Sedona this weekend. The GRAND CANYON is the coolest thing I have ever seen, I am so happy I got to go there! We squeezed this trip into two days, so there is so much more to see and do and I am definitely going back for more at some point. The weather was perfect which made for an even better trip and experience! Here are some pictures from the weekend!

My first view of the Grand Canyon...amazing!

This was a cool walk-out point that I found...you had to climb down to get to it and I did. Very high drop!

This is me sitting on the edge of that very same walk-out point! IT WAS AWESOME!

Me and the other interns...it was a great day!

Now this is Sedona...this was a hike that we went on. The city is filled with these reddish mountains...great scenic views everywhere!

I found a friend on the hike!

Sendona has a very weird terrain...one minute we were on a hike surrounded by red desert mountains, then the next..green forest?

Nice little creek we had to cross while were on this hike!

The trail was also surrounded by these cool rocky cliffs.

This weekend was packed full of adventure, and it was great! Enjoyed this a lot! Haha...oh yeah and work is good too! I will have some updates soon.

Downtown Phoenix Adventure!

Over the weekend the other interns and I went and explored Downtown Phoenix. We walked around for five hours, luckily we were surrounded by tall buildings so it was mostly shaded and not terribly hot. The day was good and we took a lot of pictures and saw a lot of cool things. The Downtown area has Ambassadors walking the streets for people like us who didn’t know what we were doing. They told us where to go and what to see, which was very helpful. I was also able to show the other interns the Downtown Phoenix ASU campus since I got a tour of it and they hadn't so that was nice to be able to show them around. Some other things that we saw included: Chase Field where the Diamondbacks play, the arena where the Phoenix Suns play, the Phoenix Convention Center, which had a bunch of different art pieces inside and outside that you could look at, and pretty much the whole Downtown Area in general. Here are some pictures from the day:

This is on the Downtown Phoenix ASU campus...they call it "The Jellyfish", it lights up at night and I hear it looks pretty cool!

At Chase Field...I'm hoping to go to a Diamondbacks game sometime this summer.

This is right outside the arena where they play.

Some art made completely of sand...pretty cool!

Lots of tall buildings...which I always enjoy seeing.

Just another adventure, I'm very thankful for all the experiences and things I get to see this summer! I am going to the GRAND CANYON this weekend! I have never seen it before and is something that I really wanted to do while I was down here, so I am glad the other interns wanted to go as well.

Sustainability Training Session and Fourth Week!

Yesterday’s Training Session was on Sustainability, it was presented by my supervisor Rebecca. She gave us an overview of what ASU is doing, and what some of their goals are. It was interesting to hear all the information, and I would say I learned a lot. They focus on balancing the environment, economy, and society when it comes to thinking about sustainability, and with that in mind they came up with four long-term goals.

1.       Carbon Neutrality – they hope to run one-third of their campus buildings solely on solar energy by 2020. Currently they have a lot of solar panels across campus on top of buildings and parking garages, but have plans to install many more until they run out of room.

2.       Zero waste – both solid and water by implementing the 5 Rs: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, and Recycle.

3.       Active Engagement – get all of ASU’s students and faculty/staff involved

4.       Principled Practice – this area expresses how they are going to achieve their goals

They have really tried to put a great emphasis on sustainability in University Housing getting their Pro Staff, CA Staff, and Student Organizations involved. They have the three Ps: Purchasing, Practices, and Programming; all of which reflect things you can be doing to be more sustainable.

A cool thing that I learned about is Campus Metabolism, it is this website that produces information about each building on how much energy the building is using. Students can go to website and look at their residence hall they live in and if they make an effort to turn off their lights, and use less energy they can see the difference they are making on a month to month basis. They have hall competitions to see which hall can make their percentages decrease the most, and they have worked out well. They are working towards getting all their buildings on campus connected to this website.

This was a good session and there was time to share what our campuses are doing so I heard other ideas from Missouri State, San Diego State, Florida International University, Central Michigan, and Utah State.

My fourth week is going great! I have been following up with vendors over the phone and through email and have been preparing to do some vendor outreach in Downtown Phoenix on Friday.

Meeting with RHA Advisors!

I am working throughout the summer on vendor outreach for Fall Welcome Events, but other areas within University Housing are interested in doing some outreach of their own. These other areas like to set up meetings with the area that I’m working in to see what we have done and to find out more information on how to get started.

I had a meeting with two of the RHA Advisors last week. They are interested in doing some outreach to vendors to help sponsor the many conferences students attend throughout the year. Since I have attended some of these conferences, they thought it would be good to have me to help them brainstorm what they need as RHA to get to these conferences and to what extent vendors would want to get involved. I really enjoyed sitting down and talking to them, it was nice to use my experiences from conferences and what I have learned from my internship so far.

They are looking at having vendors help fund the costs associated with conferences and donate materials or giveaways. An option that we discussed would be creating sponsorship packages, that would most likely take the form of having vendors give a monetary amount and in return RHA would provide them opportunities to reach the ASU/conference population. Some ideas were to include the company logo on the delegate conference t-shirt, allowing vendors to come to campus to do some tabling in high-traffic areas, invite the vendors to come to RHA programs throughout the year, putting the company logo on the RHA website, and giving them involvement in Finals care-packages. This was a productive meeting, and I felt like I was able to help them get started with something that their RHA has never tried before.

"A" Mountain!

Over the weekend one of the other interns and I went to the north side of campus to visit "A" Mountain. They informed me that there are hiking trails on the mountain, which I didn't know...so we decided to hike up. This isn't a huge mountain by any means, but it was a nice walk up to the top where there is a giant "A" that students made. Here are some pictures from the day:

This is the reason why they call it "A" Mountain.

Nice view of campus!

It is right next to their football stadium...so here is a little glimpse.

So this was a nice little adventure that was only about a 15 minute walk from where I live on campus, I am sure I will make plenty more walks over there before this experience is over.

Training Sessions and More!

There are four interns here for the summer. We are all in different areas, but are brought together once a week to do some professional development activities. The other interns are in the areas of Guest & Conference Housing and Student Staff Training, Recruitment & Retention. Yesterday was our first training session, but it was more of a meet and greet with the Director of Residential Life at ASU. Her name is Kendra and she gave us a lot of good information about their program here. She talked about her involvement in Student Affairs and the path that she took to get to her position. Also she was able to provide us with some insight on fun things to do in the area, which was nice. The meeting happened over lunch, so we just asked questions, talked, and ate lunch. We were encouraged by her to make the experience our own and contact other employees in our areas of interest and set up a meeting with them to learn more. I am hoping to start a list of people I would like to talk to throughout the summer and get help to find them.

The other training sessions for June include:

·         Sustainability

·         Spirit, Pride & Traditions

·         Social Entrepreneurship

I also had the chance to sit in on a couple of move-in planning meetings on Monday. This was cool to hear about another process and how they work everything. The team that meets has a wide range of positions all of which handle a different aspect of move-in. I met the Coordinators of Marketing, Operations, Technology, Interior Design, and Guest & Conference Housing. One of the Associate Directors was there along with me and my supervisor the Coordinator of Strategic Initiatives & Sustainability. They check-in about 10,000 students in two days on the Tempe campus, so you can imagine how detailed their process has to be. Something new this year, which was a big topic of discussion was their new wireless check-in system. Each resident will check-in at a central location in Wells Fargo Arena and will scan their “Passport” that will automatically check them in. From there, they go through the vendor fair “Welcome Zone”, pick up their keys at the end and then they are off to their specific hall to move in. I learned a lot of new information in the past two days, so I am looking forward to the coming weeks!

Third Week...Really? and Vendor Outreach

So I am in my third week of my internship and I can’t believe how fast time is moving, it feels like I was just driving here yesterday. Things are going great and are definitely picking up speed. On Friday, my supervisor and I did some vendor outreach using the marketing materials that I put together. We went to the Tempe Marketplace and went store to store talking with managers or employees that were working. It was nice to get out of the office and walk around a shopping center for a couple of hours. We went to about 30 stores that we didn’t have contacts from and got to update our vendor list with their information. We will see how successful this was, but we did talk to one excited manager from Nationwide Vision who was very interested in getting involved and reaching the ASU student population.  We plan to make visits to other shopping centers throughout Tempe and Phoenix in the coming weeks, so I look forward to that. In our vendor outreach efforts so far we have a lot of committed vendors and have generated just over $50,000 in sponsorships!