Meet Mallory: Event management minor

I chose sports management because it's very broad. There's really no limit to the job that you could get after school. Lots of different ways that you could take it.

I joined the event management minor because I thought that it would be most useful in the direction that I would want to go to to use my sports management degree. I've also always been the planning type for as long as I can remember. So getting an education and the logistics that goes into event planning was super helpful for me.

In the event management program, we take a lot of classes that force hands on learning. A lot of the papers that we have to write are similar to planning aspects that you would have to do in real life event planning. And a lot of them are very similar. But you also get the opportunity to decide what events you would like to do so you can really form it to your own needs and where you plan to go after graduation and your own interests.

I was at a smaller school that had probably 1,500 kids, so was definitely a big change transitioning from my one square mile school to one that was a lot bigger. There are so many more students. Obviously, not everybody knew each other, but it was a really good transition.

Yes. So I did my sports management internship through Portage Central Athletic Department and I did my event management minor internship through Kalamazoo Experiential Learning Center (KLC).

At KLC, I started out as an intern. Now I am not. I worked my way up to a different position, but we do a lot of event planning, so we get hired through clients to do the logistics and other aspects of their events. I spent most of my time working on things like food truck rallies, but we also do things through Kalamazoo Area Runners, and we also had the opportunity to work with Discover Kalamazoo for the Kalamazoo Regional Spelling Bee, which was really fun.

For me, yeah, I hope to get a job somewhere working for a NFL team or maybe wedding planning. They're very different, but that's kind of one of the good things about my major and my minor is that there's really no limit to where you can go.

Because it's a lot of hands on learning. You're truly never going to be bored. And like I said, there's really no limit to where you can take it.

I chose Western because of all of the different student activities that you can participate in and also the wide variety of majors that were offered here.