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Reflections

My internship at SportsLink was a great way to finish my studies and has provided me with all the experience and skills that I wanted from it. It gave me a clearer direction and confidence in my ability that I did not possess beforehand, which will set a great example for myself for the future. I am proud of the professional and personal development I underwent over my internship, as well as the technical skills I gained. I was also fortunate enough to be placed in a fantastic environment, full of knowledgeable and supportive co-workers who have worked in the industry for many years. Simone and PK also instilled so much confidence in me by trusting me with their social media accounts, and encouraging me with positive feedback and suggestions every step of the way. I can not say enough about how valuable it was for me to work and learn in that environment, and the internship role that they offer. I would recommend it to any future intern looking to get a well-rounded and flexible internship experience. "Opportunities for personal and career development are motivational job resources" (Fletcher, 2019).

My studies as a whole were not easy. I have struggled mightily with personal issues and motivation throughout the entirety of my degree, right up until the last assignment. Particularly the end of my 3rd year has been tough, trying to finalise assignments while going through some personal circumstances. I know I am capable of performing a lot better than I did in my studies, and I often frustrated myself, shooting myself in the foot by not preparing well enough. However looking back on the situation I was in 2 years ago, in my first year, where I got completely overwhelmed and was not prepared for my studies at all, I have made some strides to try and overcome my shortcomings. My final artefact is my application for the course which I sometimes looked back on when I was wondering whether I was going to continue. Even though I did not always succeed in doing this, I definitely improved my attitude and respect for my studies throughout the course, just not to the degree I might have liked. I am hoping to take some of this resilience and better attitude into my future career, because I know a professional environment may not be nearly as forgiving of these mistakes and lapses.

The internship was the part of the course that I was most excited for going into the course, and I think it was the aspect that I managed to get the most out of in the end. The most clear sign of personal growth to me, comes through my positive internship at SportsLink. In my first year, I struggled with assignments, leaving them months overdue and not knowing whether I was even going to complete the course. Then in my second year I improved and kept up with the course load far better, eventually accepting a second year internship. But my communication and organisational struggles meant that I wasn't quite ready. In my third year, my failed internship served as a valuable lesson and led to my great experience at SportsLink. As much as I am still frustrated at my performance through this course. The fact that I was able to gain this experience is a sign of some growth over the years that I will hopefully be able to build on going forward.

Reference.

Fletcher, L. (2019). How can personal development lead to increased engagement? The roles of meaningfulness and perceived line manager relations. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 30(7), 1203–1226. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2016.1184177

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Supervisor Evaluation

I am only able to see my 100 hour evaluation from SportsLink, but based on what I was told at the end of my internship I assume I was given similar reviews in that evaluation. Simone gave me some really positive feedback both in written evaluations and during my aforementioned check-ins after every day at the office, where I made a conscious effort to gain extra feedback and make sure I was on the right track.

She rated my performance 4.5/5 on my evaluation and was pleased with how I fit in to the organisation's culture as well as my content creation. I was pleased that she praised my creativity in the evaluation which was something I had to work very hard on during my time there. My communication was also listed as a strong point, which was a great reward for effort as that was a decisive factor in why I wasn't able to succeed in my previous internship, and generally a weak point for me to ask for help or clarification. I have attached my 100 hour evaluation in this entry, as it was great to see my efforts get noticed, and feel like a valuable member of the team.

In my self evaluation I was slightly more critical, but I was happy with how I applied myself and proud that I made some real contributions to the team. One of the goals that I set out when applying for internships was that I wanted to meaningfully contribute to an organisation and take on a challenging level of responsibility which I think I achieved.

As far as my professional development goes, I did still occasionally struggle with organisation with my content schedule and with punctuality. I sometimes failed to meet self imposed deadlines and got to the office later than I wanted to. I recognise that in a more time structured role, these are issues I will have to rectify moving forward. Strong "core self evaluation" skills contribute to creating a growth mindset and eventually have a positive effect on the future careers of students (Cao et al., 2025). I will make it a point in my future career to regularly self evaluate, as well as seeking feedback from others to gain knowledge, experience and confidence. The conscious effort to seek more feedback was a driving force in why I was able to perform well in my role at SportsLink and I believe it showed in my supervisor evaluations.

Reference.

Cao, M., Zhou, N., Duan, H., Wu, H., Li, F., & Xiang, T. (2025). Growth mindset mediates the effect of core self-evaluation on professional self-efficacy for nursing interns: A cross-sectional study. Nurse Education Today, 147, 106591. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2025.106591

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Career Aspirations

My time at SportsLink gave me a lot more clarity on my future goals and career aspirations. I gained some valuable experience and found out a lot about my skills and interests.

A future goal I have is to continue to learn and develop new skills in my career. Developing my skills so much both personally and professionally throughout my internship gave me a lot of confidence and helped me take more pride in my work, which is a feeling I want to sustain throughout the beginning of my career.

Another goal I have is to have a career in an area that I am passionate about. The reason I chose the Bachelor of Sports Media degree is because I thought I would thrive working in sports, which have been a lifelong passion for me. My internship further reinforced this idea, as I found myself noticeably energised and motivated to complete tasks in the office, particularly to do with the sports I love. Some of my best work came from working on promotions for SportsLink's NFL and NBA tours, two sports that I really enjoy and watch regularly in my own time.

I would also like to continue to build my skills in a career where I have a similar role to the one I had at SportsLink. I thoroughly enjoyed creating content and managing the organisation's social media accounts and would relish the opportunity to work in this area to start my career. I made a lot of strides in my development through my internship, but I still feel as though I have more room to grow in future which is exciting.

Silva et al. (2016) find that, "work-based experiences can be considered as important routes to early career employment."My internship has played a key role in shaping my future career choices and goals, given me an area of interest that I did not have previously, and provided me with valuable insight into an industry environment. I spoke about these goals and learnings in my showcase presentation, showing how far I have come since the beginning of the year.

Reference.

Silva, P. (2016). Stairway to employment?: Internships in higher education. Higher Education, 72(6), 703–721. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9903-9

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Achievements

I was very happy with my development through completing my internship at SportsLink. Simone wrote in one of my evaluations that they experienced one of their biggest increases in engagement and activity while I was there. Their follower count grew by at least 12% on all platforms during the time I was posting. This was a great result for me and made me feel increasingly confident as my internship went on.

Another achievement personally was how I applied myself, particularly at the start of the internship. I was a self starter, and found myself asking questions, seeking feedback and showing enthusiasm to learn and grow in the role. This is something I've had troubles with throughout the entirety of my course and in my failed second year internship. It was a really great feeling to get the positive feedback from Simone and other staff after that experience had dented my confidence a little bit.

Through my 100-hour internship evaluation, I also got largely positive feedback from Simone about my performance at SportsLink and my attitude towards the position. I was glad to see that she thought my content was good and that I had assimilated into the organisation's culture well.

I also developed my technical skills heavily during the internship. I have mentioned many times my lack of confidence with the skills that my role required going into it, that I was able to overcome with time and prolonged effort. "Work integrated learning" is crucial to the ability of students to transition into an industry after graduating (Jackson, 2015). I also was happy with the way I was able to work through challenges and problem solve, only being able to do the majority of video editing on my phone as my laptop couldn't run any editing software. I also became far more efficient at allocating time to tasks and not allowing myself to dwell on one for an excessive amount of time. I have included my proudest posting achievement while at SportsLink, which was my promotion video to promote the organisation's USA tours, their biggest tours of the year. I felt this represented my vastly improved creativity and technical skill, and made me reflect on the work I had done to get to that point.

Reference.

Jackson, D. (2015). Employability skill development in work-integrated learning: Barriers and best practice. Studies in Higher Education (Dorchester-on-Thames), 40(2), 350–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.842221

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Challenges

One of the aspects I liked about my internship experience the most was that it challenged me in multiple areas. I was given fairly significant responsibility and the position required me to self-start and problem solve very often throughout my time at SportsLink. In addition to the challenges that came with the role, I also had personal challenges that I struggled with both in my internship and my studies.

My biggest challenge came with my own personal organisation. I often struggle with organisation in any situation, and I struggled to keep track of all my content ideas and stick to my plans. I also had periods where I wasn't able to spend as much time outside of contact hours creating content, as I struggled with poor time management on my class assignments. I also have some well documented struggles with punctuality, as well as a lacking sense of urgency in general that sometimes reared its head during my internship, although I improved in that area as I created a more structured routine.

The standout challenge from my internship itself was trying to consistently find inspiration for content. Most weeks I was aiming to post 4-5 times, and it was sometimes a challenge to find worthy topics for posts. I also found myself spending too much time trying to come up with new ideas and perfect content that was already finished. Wolters & Brady (2021) contend that "effective time management does not guarantee that students will spend their time productively". I would not finish as much work as I wanted to each week despite allocating a lot of time to it To combat this, I tried to create a schedule where I would post the same types of content each week. For example, posting a sports highlight video, a graphic and a promotion for an upcoming tour each week. This helped me to not get stuck on tasks quite as often, but my aforementioned disorganisation led to me straying from my schedule at times. My artefact below is some of the weekly post ideas I implemented during my internship, as well as current and upcoming events and topics to research.

I was also challenged by having to develop my skills in video and photo editing, as well as managing content schedules and social media accounts. This was an area I was not confident in when my internship began, but I improved over time, eventually becoming confident and efficient by the time my internship was finished. The level of responsibility and trust I was given by the organisation really fast tracked my development, as I had to really apply myself to improving, being solely responsible for most of SportsLink's social media content.

Reference.

Wolters, C. A., & Brady, A. C. (2021). College Students’ Time Management: a Self-Regulated Learning Perspective. Educational Psychology Review, 33(4), 1319-1351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09519-z

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Effective contribution

Feedback was an extremely important resource for me during my time at SportsLink. Feedback is a valuable tool that helps to "positively motivate" its recipients (Pitt & Norton, 2017). My co-workers and Simone were very supportive and always happy to look over my work or answer my questions. I tried to utilise this as much as possible in my internship from the beginning. Before leaving the office each day, I would give Simone a brief summary of what I worked on that day and how I was tracking with any assigned tasks. I also made a point to ask for suggestions on any post ideas, or upcoming events that someone in the office was coordinating. I struggle to be proactive in asking for feedback sometimes, but my improvement in this area led to more content ideas, confidence and motivation with each passing week.

One of the best examples of how I used the support of the office was when my co-worker Chris was able to coordinate me travelling to a location to film wrestling content during a practice session. SportsLink are partnered with Wrestling Australia and he is the one that handles their travel in the office. By utilising the support and knowledge of my co-workers, I was able to make content about a sport that I wasn't very familiar with, and had an opportunity to capture my own footage, which was a great learning experience. I have attached a short TikTok video that I posted, with footage I collected at the practice.

I was also given specific tasks and content to create during my time by SportsLink owner Paul Kelly (PK). This involved him sending me a concept or description of a piece of content he needed, then I tried to replicate his idea and sent it back to him for feedback. I often needed to tweak a few things multiple times on many of these videos, and the feedback gave me a great idea of the type and style of content that he and the office were after.

The feedback and support I received throughout the entirety of my internship from the office and my supervisors was one of the driving forces of my performance in the role, and was crucial for the development of my technical and professional skills, as well as my confidence in completing any task given to me.

Reference.

Pitt, E., & Norton, L. (2017). “Now that’s the feedback I want!” Students’ reactions to feedback on graded work and what they do with it. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(4), 499–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1142500

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Finding my feet

I arrived to my first day at SportsLink early and professionally dressed, greeting everyone in the office for the first time. This alone was a big focus, as we had discussed the importance of these aspects in transition to professional practice class earlier in the year, on top of my personal issues with punctuality and general organisation. I met Simone who had conducted my interview and chosen me for the internship to speak more in depth about my role. 

She spoke to me about the expectations the organisation had for me and gave me some initial tasks. I focused on being attentive and asking questions throughout the introduction, trying to clarify my role as much as possible. SportsLink had social media accounts, but they did not have someone to run them or consistently post, so my job was basically to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts, create content and promote their tours. I was given logins to their accounts and the meta business suite to create a content plan right away. Simone also asked that I review the organisation's new website, as she wanted an outsider perspective on how their new site looked and functioned. She sent me an email detailing her expectations and then showed me around the office. I met the team who introduced themselves and made me feel welcome straight away, and then began doing some research on their social media strategy. They were far more active on their Facebook page and had over five times the followers as opposed to their Instagram, so making sure I posted on there as well as Facebook was something I noted in my content plan. I also gained the login for their TikTok page that their previous intern had created, aiming to appeal to a younger audience as that was a low demographic in their existing audience.

I then looked at their newly designed website. Jongmans et al. (2022) find that "without pleasure, usability could hardly affect website evaluation" leading me to place a heavier emphasis on how the website looked and presented while analysing it. Apart from some inconsistencies between the mobile and computer versions and minor grammatical mistakes, the website was quite visually appealing and had improved drastically from the re-design.

I have attached my first attempt at a graphic to promote the Abu Dhabi showcase tour that Simone asked me to prioritise in our initial meeting. I spent a lot more time on this than I would now, but I was happy with how it turned out considering my lack of prior experience and confidence. I used it as an example of the type of content I would be posting in the future with the approval of Simone and another senior office member Mike, who had been working on promoting the tour before I arrived.

Reference.

Jongmans, E., Jeannot, F., Liang, L., & Dampérat, M. (2022). Impact of website visual design on user experience and website evaluation: the sequential mediating roles of usability and pleasure. Journal of Marketing Management, 38(17–18), 2078–2113. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2085315

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Preparedness

I felt reasonably prepared going into my internship at SportsLink travel. I really tried to apply myself in the transition to professional practice class and learned a lot about myself in the process. I began to figure out what my strengths and weaknesses were, started a LinkedIn page and got a couple of wakeup calls about my frankly lacking professionalism.

I found that the mock interviews we did helped me a lot to practice for my real interview with SportsLink GM Simone. I usually perform well speaking in front of people but I was surprised that I didn't do quite as well when forced to talk about myself, especially positively. This was a really big focus of the transition class and definitely helped me become more confident talking about myself in front of others. This newfound confidence paid off when I was interviewed and quickly chosen for my internship.

Similarly, the class was heavily focused on building our resumes and identifying professional skills. I had not updated my resume in a long time and this was a good exercise for me to really think about my skills and experiences. Learning how to write personalised cover letters was also valuable as I had never previously written one, and my first few attempts turned out to be far too lengthy. My artefact attached below is my application to Sportslink with my cover letter and resume. My cover letter was still a little bit too wordy and I was lacking some experience, but I was very happy with how much I improved these documents throughout the class.

Employers "make judgements about the applicant's suitability for employment based on resume quality" (Shore & Forrester, 2021). Due to the resume often being the first impression a prospective employer makes about you before they even meet you, it was crucial that I updated my resume and included plenty of skills, experience and references, to be chosen for an intern position.

The role itself at SportsLink was one that was going to challenge me. I had never meaningfully managed any social media accounts and had very limited skills with video and photo editing, only what had been demonstrated to me in previous classes. However, one thing I wanted from my internship was to challenge myself and really develop my skills in preparation for the industry, particularly those that I considered a weak area. So despite some challenging and daunting aspects, and knowing that I needed to apply myself to improve, I felt reasonably prepared overall when my internship began.

Reference.

Shore, T., Tashchian, A., & Forrester, W. R. (2021). THE INFLUENCE OF RESUME QUALITY AND ETHNICITY CUES ON EMPLOYMENT DECISIONS. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 22(1), 61–76. https://doi.org/10.3846/jbem.2020.13670