Jenna Ledbetter

Responsibilities

My responsibilities as an intern include taking on roles such as park supervisor, cabana coordinator, and concert assistant. As park supervisor, I am in charge of ensuring all 13 bars in both the park and waterpark are running smoothly and dealing with any issues that arise such as being out of something, technical issues, customer complaints, and any other questions that come up. With this role, I am also the supervisor for our 48 bartenders and am always leading them to do their best. As cabana coordinator, I book cabanas and deal with all cabana reservations, set up and clean cabanas, coordinate all orders and requests for our servers to complete for the guests, handle all customers issues, deal with payments, tips, and refunds, and keep up with our cabana spreadsheets. As concert assistant, I am in charge of ensuring everything on the function detail sheet is completed by its designated time, setting up the green room for the band, helping the band and sound crew with any requests they have, and supervising the concert to ensure nothing goes wrong.

Accomplishments

My greatest accomplishment during my internship experience was coordinating our cabana event with the cast of the Broadway musical, Hamilton. My role included the the day before and morning of the event I setup everything according to their event manager’s function detail sheet, following the itinerary and coordinating food and drink deliveries, and assisting with the cleaning of the cabanas. I am proud to have successfully run this 85 attendee event that made the company over $4000.

Learning experience

The greatest lesson that I’ve learned from this experience has been that you get what you put into. My managers were very upfront about that and informed us early on that this could be an amazing learning experience if we put in the effort for it, or it could be like any other job where not much was gained. I put in many extra hours of work from coming in on my days off, coming in early, and staying late to get as much hands-on experience as possible. I also ask many questions which have been very helpful in gaining tons of knowledge regarding events. And then when I didn’t feel like I was learning much anymore, I spoke up and had meetings with my manager to work out a way to switch things up for this internship to continue to provide me with beneficial skills.

What advice would you give?

If I could pass on any advice to future students in event management it would be to get as much experience as possible. A textbook can only teach you so much about events, the real learning happens through hands-on experience with planning, working, and coordinating events. Even if you are just job-shadowing or volunteering to help, seeing for yourself what all goes on behind the scenes of events is extremely beneficial information. So I definitely recommend experimenting with a variety of different internships or jobs to find out what you really want.