Chapter 2
BROADENING YOUR HORIZONS BY BREAKING INTO THE EXTROVERT’S CULTURAL SPHERE
MY FIRST JOB IN THE US was a sports marketing internship at my university.
The University of Minnesota is a Division I school that attracts a lot of top-talent players and has many national competition goals. The school puts a lot of effort into sports marketing to draw in even more fans who come to watch the school’s various sports teams compete; this, in turn, increases the school’s visibility and name recognition throughout the country. When it comes to professional sports, we are talking about a huge industry. In 2019, according to a Forbes survey, the average team value for a professional American football team was around $2.86 billion. Professional Major League Baseball (MLB) teams rake in about $1.78 billion on average. If you were to compare such a team to a company, it would be considered the same size as a large corporation. This kind of profit scale is considered absolutely massive in other industries.
In spite of the fact that we wouldn’t be getting course credit or a salary for the sports marketing internship and the hours would be long and tiring, the selection process for getting the position was pretty cutthroat. It was far more competitive than many of the interviews I slogged through when I was applying for full-time work. But getting a university’s sports marketing internship was the first step to getting into the vast, fascinating sports marketing industry, so it’s no surprise that the competition was so fierce. When I look back, it seems as if it was like an episode of America’s Next Top Model. The only difference was that my competition wasn’t slim women with stunningly beautiful faces; instead, I was up against a group of slender, imposing, muscular men and women whose faces were all smiles, topped off with sunny dispositions.
After being bombarded with several rounds of interviews, I got the internship. Then, after going through several rounds of training, I finally got to the day where I had to take a professional work photo for my badge; only then could I finally breathe a little and enjoy the happiness of surviving the entire ordeal. I didn’t know what would come next, but what did would be the first test.
After all the interns had photos taken for IDs, we sat down in a spacious and comfy conference room filled with early-morning light. The manager handed out a stack of papers to each of us. “It’s probably just for filling out some basic information about ourselves,” I thought to myself, yet the atmosphere in the room gradually changed to make it seem as if we would be dealing with something overly grave and serious. My colleagues sitting around me gave off murderous expressions one by one. Three minutes later, when I got to the same place in my stack, I knew exactly where this dread was coming from—this was the statement on the last part of this questionnaire: “Please write about the three sports you are most interested in managing, and why.”
In this year-long internship, selecting which sports you’re interested in managing can be the most important thing you ever do. Picking the right sports can make your resume shine and put your name right on the map. It can even bring you opportunities like being picked up by a professional team. That being said, a lot of people in sports marketing see being responsible for managing an unpopular sport as a waste of time.
On this first day of battle to see who would end up managing the popular sports, I could see that a few colleagues had prepared completely. A moment after they read this statement, their pens started flying madly as they wrote down everything they could—they described their experiences and what they knew from working for big names in sports broadcasting or from their connections to professionals working in the field, among all sorts of other advantages. Of course, this is what they told me after we left the room. Initially I felt panic and felt directionless, but I gathered my thoughts quickly and came up with a strategic plan, which helped me successfully win bids to manage two collegiate teams at my university—baseball and women’s soccer.
Admittedly, in Minneapolis, you’re snowed in for about six months of the year, so baseball isn’t as popular as it is in warmer places; as a result, there weren’t many others competing to market the baseball team. Add to that I had the advantage of coming from Taiwan, where baseball has a massive following and where players are commonly scouted to play on US teams. As for how I ended up getting the soccer team marketing bid, it’s because the target audience of women’s soccer is mostly women, and I obviously have an advantage in that department. These two sports happen to be some of the few that actually have professional leagues.
Maybe you’ve already figured out what made me incomparably lucky—they used a questionnaire, so I got to respond in writing rather than have to go up on a stage like a one-in-a-million performer competing on American Idol. When filling out the questionnaire, I had enough time to think about my own strategies based on my own skills and edges. I wasn’t impulsively investing in a competition in which I wouldn’t get much in return.
Yet, frankly speaking, in Western societies, and especially in marketing-related industries, the industry just isn’t geared toward introverts most of the time.
For example, let’s say that to get your first job, you have to go to job fairs in convention centers with hundreds of thousands of other people who are all packed into a stifling and loud venue slowly ambling from job table to job table. Putting yourself out there, showing people your abilities and qualifications when you are packed in among hundreds of stalls and other individuals, is a nearly impossible task. In this case, I think the only thing you can do to actually bring yourself any attention is pull off a carnival act, like swallowing a flaming sword.
In the first round of entrepreneurial interviews, the interviewer often calls in all the interviewees at once and has them sit down in a row. It’s like being on a reality TV show with a rapid-fire interview; the interviewees are only given a limited amount of information with which to generate an immediate response. In this situation, the interviewer will most likely prefer the interviewee who has a radiant smile and an energetic, enthusiastic voice, and who can often answer questions within the shortest amount of time without thinking too much, showing agile reactions and an ability to dive effortlessly into whatever situation/scenario they get into. I know what type of interviewee they’d prefer, but I’m just not able to be like that.