Michelle Wilke - Center for Violence Prevention

As a student intern in the beginning my focus was to assist in the area of Group Travel and how to get more diverse groups into the museum, especially Veterans from the community and surrounding areas. As things started flowing together while working, I learned the basics of how the Grout Museum controls their group travel, and how they market themselves to certain populations and locations around the Midwest. Another big portion of group travel is how to get groups from the community to the museum, to which I focused on more so. Learning ways to entice community visitors and residents through marketing and programming is not easy, but I learned how to get out there and accomplish it. I got groups such as the Professional Women of Waterloo, Cedar Valley Historical Society, and veteran groups in the area to come and visit, which was a very rewarding feeling. It was so exciting to see all kinds of people who had some similar connection to the community through their military experience or if they had just been living in Waterloo their whole life come and visit the museum for the first time. I was also trained on the different group rates to offer and the logistics of how to book a tour. Another job I accomplished was taking over the Events and Sales Coordinator position at the museum. Any rentals will connect with that person and plan their special event For example; any conference, meeting, social gathering etc. are some of the different types of events that go on at GMD that I had to take care of during my internship. Accomplishing the duteous ways of the event coordination side of things helped me get used to the Do’s and Don’ts of the job. It was exciting to learn something different than group travel, and it helped to understand what all the GMD is capable of doing for the community as a whole. I learned a lot at this internship, and accomplished more than I was thinking I would in the beginning; because of that I have grown professionally and feel much more confident going out in the business world to find a career.https://scholarworks.uni.edu/koob_recipients/1042/thumbnail.jp