NCF's Intern Class is Largest Ever

by Heather Johnson Durocher

Twenty-two-year-old Devin Gowen didn’t know much about Traverse City prior to applying for a 15-week internship with the National Cherry Festival, but the New Hampshire college student liked the idea of gaining real-world experience by working with a long-standing community event.

Gowen is among five college students who recently started an internship with the National Cherry Festival. Four more students will come on board this spring, rounding out the 2012 intern class that dives into all things Cherry Festival – not to mention other Festival-sponsored events, like next month’s Winter WOW!Fest and March’s Leapin’ Leprechaun 5K road race.

This year’s intern class is the largest to date, says Trevor Tkach, the Cherry Festival’s interim executive director who calls the program “my baby.”

“We’ve had interns for a number of years, but we started to get more sophisticated with the program four or five years ago,” Tkach says.

He’s taken cues from successful internship programs downstate, such as the one offered with the West Michigan Whitecaps minor league baseball organization and another through Central Michigan University’s recreation, parks and leisure department.

Most interns are from Michigan, though some come from colleges outside the state and even from overseas. Last year’s class included a student from Germany. Their majors vary, too, from communications and event planning to parks and recreation.

Intern positions are ever-evolving. When the festival came out with an enhanced ticket system, an intern assisted specifically with the box office. This year brought the first social media/communications internship.

“It’s gotten to be such a big thing to manage our message on the web, through email and all these other facets,” Tkach explains.

Whatever the position, interns are “always busy,” he says. “They’re here for half a year and are really getting a feel for running this business. They don’t just want to come in and make coffee, which internships can turn into. They’re here to learn and get their hands dirty—and they do that.”

Along with honing workplace skills and learning more about northern Michigan, interns could very well end up with job leads.

That’s what former intern Michelle Elliott, 24, experienced in 2009 when she took on sales and marketing duties for the festival. “I got a really well-rounded internship experience there, which is why I enjoyed it so much,” says Elliott, who met her future employer – Viktor Incentives & Meetings, a Traverse City travel company – at a festival event.
 
The job perks aren’t too shabby, either. “We get a small stipend and they pay for our housing,” Gowen says of the $1,000 each intern receives and the accommodations that are provided by Arbors of Traverse Apartments.

The festival is July 7-14. For more information, http://visit.cherryfestival.org/