The second-year internship program aims to provide student-athletes real-world experience working within a university athletics department and help them in their desired career paths. They will be working 150 hours between May and August and will be paid $1,500 for their service.
Redshirt senior swimmer Emily Fogle, a movement and sport sciences major, took a little time away from her workouts and her internship with the compliance office to update purduesports.com on how everything is going.
How has the first month on the job been going?
This internship has been wonderful. I feel very fortunate to be able to come to work every day and be surrounded with such hardworking, passionate and insightful coworkers.
What have you learned through the internship so far?
I have had the distinct privilege to learn what it takes to keep Purdue Athletics moving forward in the Big Ten Conference and on the national level. Working in the compliance department has allowed me to learn about the rules and regulations student-athletes, coaches and institutions must abide by to keep their student-athletes eligible.
Do you have a new respect or understanding for what goes on behind the scenes in the department?
I definitely have a newfound respect for the tremendous efforts done by the Purdue Athletics staff. As an athlete, you oftentimes become all consumed in your sport, your performance or your schedule, and can easily forget the people who are putting in work behind the scenes.
However, as an intern, I am able to notice what it takes to keep athletes like myself competing. It has been an incredibly humbling experience to work behind the scenes of an organization like Purdue Athletics.
What is your typical day like? How do you balance your new work schedule with your offseason workouts?
My typical day starts out at around 5:20 a.m. when I get up to get ready for morning practice. We swim for nearly two hours in the morning, then I run home, quickly eat breakfast and get ready for my internship, which I arrive at around 8:30 a.m. I work until about 12:30 or 1 p.m. and go home to get ready for afternoon practice. Certain days, I will have an afternoon meeting with a professor on campus in the women's, gender and sexuality studies program as I have been conducting research with her this past year. Then, in the afternoon, I go back to swim practice. We swim for another two hours, until about 5 p.m., followed by an hour of a weights/dryland/cross-training session. At 7 p.m. on most day, I work at the Lafayette Domestic Violence Intervention and Prevention Program as their crisis hotline assistant. I usually arrive home around 9:30 p.m. and get ready to do it all over again the next day!
The compliance staff has been very accommodating to my swim and academic research schedule, allowing me to balance my prior commitments and this internship quite easily.
Has your internship changed your career plans or made it clearer to you what you might want to do?
This internship has certainly opened my eyes to the potential to work in the compliance world. As a women's gender and sexuality studies minor here at Purdue, I knew there was potential to work in Title IX compliance. After working in this internship, however, I am able to weigh my options further and perhaps see that potential come to fruition. I am grateful for this experience and opportunity and am going to take what I have learned from my supervisors with me in my future academic and work endeavors, whatever they may be.