My Internship Experience at the Fitness Clinic
For those I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Andrew Brainard, the summer intern here at the Fitness Clinic. I wanted to thank each and every one of the clients and trainers here for making my internship experience not only a great opportunity to learn and develop my skills but also making me feel like part of the community here at the clinic.
When I first started looking for internship opportunities during my junior year at Ball State University, my counselor almost immediately recommended Sam as a mentor. She thought that Sam’s mentoring skills would compliment the way I learn and give me the best overall internship experience. Naturally, with such a glowing recommendation, I followed up a few days later. After some initial emails and video calls, things just seemed to fall into place. Soon, I got a tour of the facility and began coming into “shadow” during some of my school breaks. Before I knew it, I was driving in for my first official day of my internship.
I had some high expectations for myself coming into day one and had set some challenging goals for myself, like:
Complete my training certification
Design a business plan for my own training business
Start training clients on my own
I’d love to say that I crushed these goals with no problem, but that wasn’t the case. Life has a funny way of changing plans from time to time, and my internship was no different.
The first week of my internship mainly consisted of me introducing myself to everyone (thanks for the warm welcome) and just getting in the rhythm of things here at the facility. Once I got settled in, Sam and I worked together to find projects and experiences that would best align with my goals for the summer. Some examples of these projects would be learning about LLCs and what they can do for me, facility maintenance like working on the water fountain (if you know, you know), and also creating videos to bolster the Vimeo library. I think these learning experiences really helped broaden my skill set and gave me a better picture of what it takes to operate a facility like the Fitness Clinic. As time progressed, I also began finding my own projects to work on, like creating the FC Travel Bag.
As I was getting to know everyone, I noticed that there were a lot of folks here who had long vacations planned for the summer. I thought that having a lightweight and easily packable bag with some familiar training equipment could be an easy way for our clients to get a little “Fitness Clinic To-Go”. Progress on the bag was slow-going at first; it turns out designing a program from scratch takes some time and effort. Though, once we started getting some of the samples in, progress really started to pick-up. Before I knew it, bags were on their way out the door.
While the travel bag project was coming to a close, I noticed that I still had some pretty big goals to finish up before the summer was over, and I had a lot of work to do. I love being busy, but I knew if I took on too many projects at once, I wasn’t going to be able to maintain the quality of work that I expect from myself. After a little self-reflection and some mentorship from the other trainers here, I put my business design plans on the back-burner and prioritized getting certified for the last few weeks of the internship.
I am truly grateful for the opportunity to intern here at the Fitness Clinic. Having the chance to learn from so many great trainers is something that I’ll never forget. As far as my future plans, as some of you may have guessed (especially since I’m writing this in October) I’m planning on training here at the clinic. I have since completed my personal training certification and have started working with clients pro-bono to build up my experience. I’m really excited to see what the future holds here at the clinic and can’t wait to work with all of you! If you’d like to work together, click here to book an appointment!
Yours in health,
Andrew