Wellness Internship

Hey Everyone!

If you don't already know, I'm an MBA candidate at Clemson University in Greenville, SC. I'm not your tradition businesswoman, but I do have a passion for creativity/innovation, overall health, and wellness, which I plan to evolve into a business of my own one day (a post for another time perhaps).

As apart of the curriculum, students must complete an internship. After multiple meetings with the Director of Student Experience about my interests and passions, we came to the conclusion that creating a wellness program for the MBA students would be the perfect internship for me.

I'm going to focus on three elements, physical, mental, and nutritional.

1. I want to create a running club or have students socialize by attending group fitness classes, use exercise as a way to relieve their stress and anxiety. 2. I'd like to bring in a mental health professional to host workshops with our students and to hold one on one sessions. 3. Encourage students to bring their own snacks and meals and shift the idea that socializing over late nights at the bars is the best way to create freindships (Definitely not against this but I'd rather go to a yoga class and brunch with friends on a weekend morning than be tired all day). Overall, one of the biggest challenges will be creating casual but informative events that students want to go to.

I want to document and share this process for a few reasons.

First and foremost, the Greenville campus lacks resources that are offered on the main campus, which provides such a wide variety of resources to their students -including mental health counseling and an amazing fitness facility. The current online portal for counseling, CAPS is well thought out, but I would love to see more Greenville resources. This would be a huge step for not only the students but the university/program in general.

Leaving my mark on Clemson. Although I had a fantastic experience during undergrad, I want to accomplish something more and be proud to say I created/launched the wellness program at Clemson's MBA program.

I'm always working to personally grow, and each opportunity or challenge I accept teaches me something. I'm very open to trying new things when it comes to my career because you never know it might lead to. And if it's not the best experience, I can cross it off the list of things I know I don't want to pursue. And within the last few years I've learned that not having a set path for my career is a lot more common than I thought, so why not explore new opportunities?

So I started a few weeks ago and have been compiling questions to send out in a survey, collecting a variety of information on how to structure a wellness program, and meeting with health professionals to get their advice. Overall, I'm really looking forward to seeing where the internship goes, how I can improve physical, mental, and nutritional aspects of the MBA students. Even if I don't launch the wellness program by the time my internship is done, I'm hoping to continue overseeing this project until it's ready to share with students.

If you have any advice/suggestions, go to my contact page and send them my way. I'll update my progress within a few weeks. Until then, anyone want to go to yoga and brunch next Saturday? :)

Thanks for reading!

xx maria