Internship at APA

Jun 4, 2019
3 min read

Updated: Aug 25, 2019

Hey guys!

This year I spent a lot of time at my studio for a new reason other than dancing: interning! Now I can call myself a dancer, teacher, and INTERN at APA. I took a dance independent study course with a focus on the business of dance.

For my independent study, I completed this internship at APA, taking on various different roles and jobs, but focusing on two big projects: Company Costumes, and the APA Cafe. Throughout my internship, I completed 135 hours of work in various situations, settings, times, and all throughout this year. These experiences taught me so much that can apply to my everyday life, working in a business like APA, or to even pursuing a dance performance career. To be completely honest, this experience helped me understand more where I want to take dance in my career and that I don't necessarily want to pursue being a studio director(Who knows, but at least at this point:)). I think every part of this experience was great to learn though, and better to gain insight now instead of getting into the feild and realizing it isn't my biggest dream but instead I would want to alter. The skills and knowledge I gained though could even help with being a performer in the dance world, or running a food business in combination with my dance career.

Having these experiences over the past year has also provided me with insight to what the dance studio world looks like from the other side(the parts that aren’t dancing).

This year I wasn't able to dance for most of the year due to an injury and a lengthy recovery time... but because of my internship, I was able to stay involved with the competition season, and all the prepping that goes into it as well!

My first big project of the year was COSTUMES!

If you want to see a very small piece of evidence that can show you just a little about that process and how much it evolved over the year, here is the spreadsheet I made for measurements at the beginning of the year!

And then at the end of the year, it had so many colors, new sections, and while was pretty organized, it looks super confusing!

Costumes had so many details with returns and things that I never really thought about before, so it was really interesting to gain new perspective as well as gaining skills, like inventory, organizational skills, budgeting, measurements, returns/exchanges, time management, customer service, and more!

My next big project was the APA CAFE!!!

This is a Cafe within the dance studio that I will be starting up with Hillary and then completely running! It started out with prepackaged foods but eventually will include homemade healthy treats as well!

This opportunity is great for now applying all the business skills I had been learning with the costumes and applying them... and learning even more!

I have designed all the Cafe menus, plans, inventory systems, budgeting organization, marketing, etc. So far, it is going really well and I have learned a lot. I look forward to being able to implement the homemade healthy snack factor next season!

Here's a couple pics from the cafe!