Sports as a developing tool

Rodrigo Pacheco Carrillo, Hospitality & Tourism Management, internship at the Peruvian Olympic Comittee: I have realized how important the internship is as part of our education.

I’m enrolled as a student from the Hospitality & Tourism Management under the program of Sport & Events Management here at UCN. Sports is a field that has attracted my attention all my life, besides having the honor to be a member of my Peruvian badminton national team and represent them at international competitions, I have always feel that sport and I have a strong link.

When I enrolled at UCN to be a “Sports Management” student, my idea was that someday I would have the chance to contribute to the development of my Peruvian society by using sports as a tool. I come from Peru, and as you might know we are not a well developed country, and it is reflected in our sports organization situation, so as an elite sports person and mostly as a Peruvian citizen I feel that I have the duty to give something back to my country after I finish my education.

During my education I had the opportunity to start building the knowledge for my professional future. I started to understand how sports organizations work and how they should be managed in an efficient way. Then, after a whole year of classes it was our time to go abroad for our internships period and show what we were capable of and discover new challenges for us.

For my internship period I was able to work in Lima - Peru at our Peruvian Olympic Committee, for me it was a great opportunity to work in such an important sports organization like an Olympic Committee is. It gave me the opportunity to work with them in different sports projects to help develop our Peruvian society; this experience showed me how sports can influence a society and its economical situation.

During those months I helped them in different tasks concerning the daily work of the Olympic Committee, some of the most interesting tasks I could contribute to was to organize an international multi sports event for our South America region, it was the “Beach Bolivarian Games”, where countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Peru will participate.

Another great opportunity that I received was that for the first time in our Peruvian educational system a University was going to offer the studies of “Sports Management”, which will be a huge step to prepare future professionals in this field to take those important director´s positions in our sport´s organizations. This private university that is going to launch this education invited me to sit with them as they wanted to know about my experience of studying this education here in Denmark at UCN.
 

After this experience I have realized that there is a huge difference on what we learn in class and what we learn out there in the field; I know that this is not something new to say but finally I had the chance to experience it by myself. After these last few months of internship I have realized how important it was as part of our education, and how much I learned from that experience.
 

Now I´m back to our university again, full armed with new weapons and open minded to keep exploring this fascination world of sports in our lectures. I know that someday I´ll be able to achieve what I wanted when I joined UCN, I know I will be able to help my Peruvian society, I´ll be prepared!