‘If This is What My Post-Grad Work Life is Going to Be, Then I Made the Right Choice’

After I encountered some challenges finding an internship, I saw an opportunity to use my own connections that I had already established to essentially create my own internship. Connecticut-based SuperCharged Racing, the largest multi-level, indoor karting facility in the world, is in a bit of a “rebuilding and rebranding” phase, and there are a lot of moving parts that I’ve been tasked with documenting, and I’m very excited for the challenge.

While my work has an obvious direct correlation to my video production degree, I’m also getting a bit of a taste in the marketing and analytics aspect of communications that I haven’t really studied so far. Understanding the demographics of who is consuming the media content I’m creating, especially for a large business, is pivotal in a way I’ve never really considered.

By the end of my internship, I hope to have a portfolio to display my videography skills. I also hope to develop intangible skills, such as working under strict deadlines and working in a setting outside of a classroom.

Looking back, my first week on the job felt very successful, to say the least. Within that time period, I created the second and third-most liked posts on SuperCharged’s Instagram, created a semi-viral TikTok video that gained us more than 150 new followers, and began production on not only one, but two long-form projects. It was a lot of work, but it was very rewarding to see my hard work pay off so quickly.

On my first day, I kept telling myself, “if this is what my post-grad work life is going to be, then I made the right choice.” The thing I love most about video production is that it’s really and truly such a rewarding field. I love the process of building a video and putting it together in postproduction, and this internship is offering me that in abundance.

To be a team player is to momentarily put aside personal goals to fully commit oneself to a collective goal. A good soccer player doesn’t care about how many goals they’ve scored, but how many the team scores. I like to think I fit my definition of a team player pretty well. A good follower is someone who understands the benefits of observing someone more knowledgeable in a field and lets the leader “set the pace.”

The last chance I had to be a part of a team setting, I was a part of one of the production teams for the University’s Caribbean Student Association’s Annual Fashion Show. Due to the extenuating circumstances of one of my fellow team members, I took a leadership role on our team. We delegated roles as much as possible, but there were a handful of factors out of our control that led to me deciding that it’d be best for the team as a whole that I take the lead on the project. I don’t know if I could’ve done better at being a part of the team, but as a point of retrospective improvement, I do wish I came to that decision earlier during the production process.

I was able to apply this experience during my internship. On one of the shoot dates for my internship, my manager wasn’t on site for the shoot, and I had to take charge of the shoot. Even though there were a couple hiccups, I took what I learned from my shoots at the University during the semester to make the shoot as good and clean as possible. I’m looking forward to even more of these opportunities in the future.

Aaron Grier ’22, a communication major at the University of New Haven, is completing an internship at SuperCharged Racing as part of the University’s Bergami Summer Internship Program.