In the hotel lobby, she met the other IAAPA ambassadors, who were from Australia, Europe, France, the Netherlands, China, Asia, and the United States. Their expertise ranged from being managers at Universal and majors in mechanical engineering to being employees in amusement parks.
As the youngest person in the room and a journalism student, Kaitlyn felt so humbled, thinking, I don’t deserve this. How am I here? Yet, the other interns accepted her with open arms, saying, “It’s so cool that you decided to do this out of everything else!”
The next two days were spent in leadership and customer service training.
“We talked about pretty much everything from how to be that ‘first’ face of the company and how to run the membership lounge, sales office, and VIP lounge, to all the different logistics of the trade show,” Kaitlyn said.
On Tuesday, the Trade Show began.
“It was very non-stop. I was going from this station to that station and, when I had a pause, I’d visit the show floor,” she said. On the show floor, there were many booths, each with a company trying to sell their product or introduce their company to others.
IAAPA had strict rules for the booths. Kaitlyn would walk through and check for rule violations: people leaving their booths, people with different animatronics in their booths that were jutting out beyond their booth boundaries, and more.
“Learning how to tell hard news positively was such a good skill to work on,” Kaitlyn said. “There were so many times when it’s easy to just go up to someone and say, ‘You can’t do this,’ or ‘You shouldn’t do that.’ Instead, I learned to say something like, ‘Please stay inside of the boundaries of your trade show booth’ or ‘Here, you can go to registration if your tag doesn’t have the right label to get you into the education session.’”
Kaitlyn saw these words of wisdom as something that could be applied to her own life. She admits PHC is her comfort zone, a safe place to be trained and equipped by fellow believers.
“Christ calls us to be in the world and not of it, so we actually have to step out and be in the world. That’s something that really resonated with me. I ask myself, How can I have more of these experiences while I’m at PHC and never treat the summer as just a break from school, but as a time to continue growing and learning?”
Patrick Henry College exists to glorify God by challenging the status quo in higher education, lifting high both faith and reason within a rigorous academic environment; thereby preserving for posterity the ideals behind the "noble experiment in ordered liberty" that is the foundation of America.