The Winter Olympics officially begin on Friday in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Almost 3,000 athletes from 92 nations across the world will be present. This year, eight students from the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College will get to find out what it’s like to watch the games in person.

They’ve earned the opportunity to intern in South Korea with NBC during the Winter Olympics. Another 21 student interns from the Park School will be stationed at the NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, assisting with the broadcasts of the games.

The internships are all part of an opportunity that few communications schools across the country — one being Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications — are presented with.

Diane Gayeski, who has been the dean of the Park School for the past eight years, said since the 2006 Olympics, Ithaca has sent students to every winter and summer games.

NBC selected Ithaca as part of a select group of schools to offer Olympic internships due to its high national rankings and previous interns who worked with the company. Gayeski said several students from the Park School have interned with NBC in the past through the college’s New York City and Los Angeles programs.

The application process for an Olympic internship this year consisted of a video interview, said Gayeski, and officials from Ithaca and NBC exchanged information so that the school could coordinate with potential applicants.

After NBC notified interns of their selection, they were assigned roles and informed whether they would be based in South Korea or Connecticut for the Olympics.

While many of the jobs that the interns in South Korea will be undertaking are currently undisclosed, Gayeski said in the past students on-site were stationed at a particular sport or venue and would help with the logistics of a large-scale broadcast.

Interns in Connecticut have just as important of a job, Gayeski said, explaining that NBC records a lot more material than what actually ends up on-air. For this reason, many students in Stamford work on editing highlights of events, logging tapes for future reference and creating digital packages for NBC’s online coverage.

Students interning in Connecticut often spend three weeks away from campus, and interns in South Korea can expect to be away for five or six weeks, Gayeski said. This commitment can be an academic burden for some students.

“At many other schools,” Gayeski said, “if students want to go they actually have to drop out of school for the semester and just do the internship.”

Gayeski said Ithaca supports its students going to the winter games, and works with each individual student to see how they can remain full-time while interning.

One way Ithaca and the Park School helps make this happen is by offering condensed courses solely for students returning from internships. These intensive courses deal with the students’ experiences from the Olympics. As a result, Olympic interns from the Park School can afford to spend several weeks away from the Ithaca campus while not having to take a semester off.

“We believe that it’s a great opportunity,” Gayeski said. “It’s quite a bit of work to do this, but we feel it’s definitely worthwhile.”

Some NBC interns from SU are taking a leave of absence in order to participate in their internships. One of those SU students is David Edelstein, a junior broadcast and digital journalism major who will be stationed in Stamford for his internship.

“In my mind, it was something that I was going to have to do,” Edelstein said. “It just only made sense to take a leave of absence.”

As he prepared for his Olympic internship, Edelstein said he was thankful not only for the opportunity to work with NBC in Stamford, but for those that helped him get to where he is.

“I’m only in the position that I’m in,” Edelstein said, “because other people have been there to support me along the way.”

Published on February 6, 2018 at 9:26 pm

Contact Jordan: jslazins@syr.edu