Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Seeing the Bright Side of the Challenges

It is without question that every single person in any job or career field experiences challenges throughout their day, week, month, etc. I am a firm believer of how you respond to those challenges directly impacts the team of people you work with along with the quality of work you produce. Too many times I’ve seen employees and even students just give up on projects or lose the drive for what they love because of some bumps in the road. Everyone experiences different things and everyone responds to challenges differently, but seeing the bright side of the challenges you face can help you become a better leader, team player, and overall better employee.

When I tell people I work for the Boston Red Sox, the response is almost always, “Wow, you must be living the dream.” While that is in fact true, this job is not always sunshine and rainbows – it’s the stuff people don’t see that can make this internship a little difficult sometimes. Working in the concerts and entertainment department, the majority of our work and efforts goes unnoticed until the night of the show. This also means that many of the people who play a key role in helping to pull these concerts off, (security, facilities, lead management), don’t always realize the amount of work that goes into preparing for a concert until the week of the show when our small four-person department is running around asking anyone and everyone for help with this thing and that. For me, this is a challenge with number one, my credibility and number two, change of pace. I find it difficult to show my credibility and my worth to some employees when we are in need of something for a concert because although I’m just an intern, I play a key role in pulling all this off since our department is so small. There have been plenty of times that I haven’t gotten the responses I need or it takes my bosses making a phone call for something to get done for me. This is a challenge that I find most interns face in any internship but I actually think it’s an incredibly great experience to have. Going into my first job after graduation, or maybe changing companies later in my career, I will at some point be the low man on the totem pole. It’s then that I’m likely going to feel just like an intern at the company and this experience now will help me persevere when I have trouble with this later in my career.

Change of pace is definitely something that has also been challenging for me throughout this internship. Although I work nearly every day and we still have to work all the baseball games, the week leading up to a concert and the actually concert days themselves define the word hectic like you’d never believe. For a week it’s long hours, late nights, and you find yourself running from one end of the park to the other all day long. I’m not going to lie, this definitely wears a person out, but I couldn’t think of a more valuable experience to have as an intern. Too many times people have an internship that’s either part time or your normal 9-5 job with no overtime and not a lot of pressure because after all “you’re just the intern” and how many key responsibilities are you really going to have? Talking to friends of mine who have graduated and started their first job, they almost all say that they were not prepared for the long hours, pressure filled environments, and hectic days. Having this experience now as an intern, I almost feel eager now to get into the real world because I feel that much more prepared.

The Red Sox have put me in a position to be challenged but also to learn in the most effective way – being a part of the company the same way another employee would be. I’m confident that having these experiences will help me shine has a new employee wherever I end up after graduation. I couldn’t be more thankful.