Overall Goal of internship
At completion of this internship, the intern will gain an excellent understanding and knowledge of how Interra Health provides a variety of health and wellness programs to employees/community-sponsored events. The intern will gain experience in behavior change facilitation including Health Risk Assessment, intervention, and reassessment, and will create promotional and marketing projects to increase participation or sales. The organizational experiences will allow for some supervision of an event, small budget experiences, in-service training, and shadowing of the internship supervisor. The intern will work with and be supervised by the Interra Health on-site internship supervisor, Robby Swessel. The intern will complete experiences as outlined by the following specific objectives and be evaluated on his/her performance in each of these areas.
The student will complete 3-4 resume-building experiences from the categories below. Specific projects and outcomes may be added as addendum to this plan within the first 2 weeks of being on-site. Significant changes to the Objectives will be mutually agreed upon by the Internship site supervisor, the student intern, and the UWSP internship supervisor and documentation of these changes will be sent to the UWSP internship supervisor.
Objectives
- Behavior:
- Observe, support and engage in wellness programs offered through coaching, hands on assistance, and training sessions. This is including but not limited to program development and implementation, marketing, participant engagement/relationship building, daily program setup and preparation.
- Wellness Coaching for members including some behavior change and shadowing or becoming certified and actually personal training and applying physiological aspect of wellness.
- Observe and help instruct LIVESTRONG at the YMCA.
- YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program assistance.
- Promotion and Marketing:
- Contribute to the marketing of all fitness and wellness programs and services through crafted website promotions, member newsletter articles, social media, and community events such as health fairs.
- Create bulletin boards within the YMCA to promote upcoming events.
- Research and implement possible opportunities to develop social media sites or enhance those already in place for the La Crosse YMCA. Create awareness through Facebook, Twitter, and potentially write daily blogs.
- Organizational Experiences:
- Learns about program partnership relationships.
- Assist in the implementation of health promotion activities and events including but not limited incentive challenges and health promotion bulletin boards.
- Shadow group fitness instructors, increase knowledge of teaching and lead select group fitness classes.
- Meet Group Exercise expectations set forth by the Group Exercise Director when shadowing group exercise classes and potentially lead a class myself.
- Sit in on meetings and learn about programming and organizational models.
- Assist in fund raising for the 2015 YMCA Annual Campaign.
- Assist in grant writing for the YMCA Foundation.
On-Site Supervisor
Lee Walraven
Wellness Director
1140 Main Street
La Crosse, WI 54601
lwalraven@laxymca.org
(608) 519-5475
Hours
12 weeks, maximum of 40 hours/week, for at least 400 total hours
Stipend
There will be no stipend for this internship however any hours spent filling a shift, personal training or teaching a class will be paid.
UW-Stevens Point Students Who Completed Internship
- Michael Paisley, Fall 2015 (pictured above)