Eighteen weddings in one day? Internship helps student experience wedding planning industry

A few weeks ago, Ashley Fratus ’14  threw 18 weddings in one day.

Fratus is interning at the Mandalay Bay Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada, which hosts more than 1,700 weddings each year. The fast-paced environment is giving her a crash course in the skills that she hoped to build this summer. “I was trying to find a place that would open a lot of doors for me in the future,” Fratus said. “It’s giving me hands-on experience in the exact field that I want to go into eventually.”

Fratus, a business major and psychology minor, hopes to become an event planner specializing in wedding events. “I’ve always been a really organized person, and I just loved to plan everything,” she said. “I also really like to interact with people. Event planning combines both of those things that I love to do. It plays right into the skills that I already have.”

This spring, she was looking for a summer opportunities in Las Vegas, her home city. She contacted Mandalay Bay’s chapel director, who offered her a 10-week position as an assistant to the chapel’s six coordinators.

The experience has allowed Fratus to learn about various wedding traditions, as well as detailed parts of making a wedding go smoothly, such as sending wedding party members down the aisle at exactly the right times. She also has seen the importance of good business management. “Since they have such a high volume, there is a lot of organization and planning that goes into it,” she said. “I’m learning how everything flows together.”

New York internship gives Randolph student advertising experience

More than 10 years ago, Bobby Crosby ’14 went to work with his uncle at a cable TV network in New York City. The fast-paced work environment and the bustling city fascinated him. “I came back and told my mom, I love the big city, and I want to work there someday,” he said.

Crosby is already fulfilling that dream with an advertising sales internship for A+E Networks, the parent company for cable stations such as A&E, Lifetime, and History. For the next several weeks, he will work closely with account executives and support their advertising efforts.

“I really want the hands-on experience that the internship will give me with sales and a better grasp on the entertainment industry,” said Crosby, a business major minoring in sociology and communication studies. “I also want to apply all the information that I’ve learned at Randolph.”

Crosby, one of the captain’s on Randolph’s men’s lacrosse team, has completed internships every summer of his college career. Two years ago, he worked for a commercial real estate agent. Last summer, he interned with a consulting firm in Paris, France. He believes those experiences helped him when he applied for the internship with A+E Networks.

In the first couple of weeks of the internship, Crosby spent most of his time conducting research on new products, programs, and other developments with prospective advertisers. He then shares that research with account executives, which helps them make the case when they meet with the prospective advertisers. “It gives the account executive some more fire power,” Crosby said.

He also has been assigned to create commercial ideas for a new television show that has not been released. When he has time away from the advertising research, he watches the show and studies the demographics of its target audience. This will help him develop ideas for advertisers.

During the 10-week internship, Crosby travels daily from his hometown of Bethel, Connecticut, to New York City—a two-hour train ride. Then the day is full of assignments, but it is worth having the busy summer, he said. “The internship is definitely keeping me busy, but I've already gained an immense amount of knowledge in just this short period of time.”

Randolph student develops business plan for local food hub

Tu Nguyen ’15 is developing a plan to help grow business for a local nonprofit that grows organic food.

Two days a week, Nguyen bikes about five miles from the Randolph campus to Lynchburg Grows, an urban farm that provides education programs and grows produce to sell in the region. He became acquainted with Lynchburg Grows last semester while taking “Economics of Food and Sustainability,” a class which studies the economic and social factors related to food production and distribution. Impressed by the operation, Nguyen sought an opportunity to work with the organization. “I sent an e-mail to Lynchburg Grows and asked if they had some internships I could do,” he said.

It turned out that there was an opportunity. The nonprofit needs a business plan for establishing a local food hub that would help local farmers sell produce to large customers such as hospitals and schools. “It would be a cross between a farmer’s market and a wholesale distributor,” explained Nate Foust-Meyer, the Lynchburg Grows farm manager and Nguyen’s supervisor. “It’s a model for bringing local farmers together.”

Having Nguyen handle the economic analysis and write the business plan will allow the project to move forward faster while allowing Foust-Meyer and other staff to focus on the farm operations. “It plays to his strengths and what he’s happy doing,” Foust-Meyer said.

Most of Nguyen’s time is spent crunching numbers, such as the cost of growing produce and the wholesale prices that the target market would be willing to pay. But he occasionally takes a break from the business plan to pull weeds and plant seeds in the Lynchburg Grows greenhouses.

Nguyen also is working in another internship, doing marketing work for a local financial planning office which he discovered through Randolph’s Experiential Learning Center. The two internships together are teaching him lessons that he would like to apply someday in a career as a financial advisor. “I am learning how a real business works,” said Nguyen, who is majoring in economics, mathematics, and physics. “This will be a really good experience for me.”