Alex Allard will be spending his summer and fall semester interning at Walt Disney World through Disney’s College Program. | Photo by Grace DeSanti.
Junior Alex Allard went from being your typical Disney-loving kid to a University of Rhode Island student who will spend his upcoming summer and fall interning at Walt Disney World.
This time last year, Allard was an engineering major struggling through the second semester of his sophomore year.
“I sat there and thought, ‘Is this really for me?’” Allard said.
It turned out that engineering wasn’t for him, and for his junior year, he changed his major to public relations and picked up a leadership studies minor.
Allard had always loved communicating with people, as well as being around people, and found that pursuing degrees in public relations and leadership will allow him to do more of that in the future.
“I felt like both of those [fields of study] really captivated my personality and were really things I would enjoy doing on the day-to-day basis versus engineering,” Allard said.
Allard had a friend who was a teacher’s assistant for professor Kelly Watts, who runs the faculty-led program Organizational Communication: Exploring Disney and the Culture of Success. His friend told him that it would be the perfect program for him and it was just a perk that it would mean he would get to go to Disney World.
After hearing about this, Allard took the opportunity and after being a student in the program, he became Watts’s teaching assistant (TA) for the program over spring break.
“I absolutely fell in love with how Disney runs everything and the ‘magic’ that they have there, not only for people who go to the park but for their cast members,” Allard said.
His experience with Watts is what led him to applying for Disney’s College Program.
“The course looks at leadership, team dynamics and organizational culture so we’re really exploring success of an organization. Disney is a model,” Watts said of her program. “When you’re walking around the park, you see it in real time. I think many of our students leave feeling like they want to work here.”
Allard was just one of those students. Now, he refers to working at Disney as a “dream job.” This summer and fall he’ll be working in attractions. He doesn’t know the specifics of where and exactly what he’ll be doing yet, but he hopes to work with Disney’s public relations.
“Any job that’s going to get me to interact with people on a day-to-day basis is going to make me happy,” he said.
He also wants to work for a company that will like and appreciate his creativity, which is something that Watts had done. She gets many students who want to TA for her in the program, but Allard stood out and got the position.
“He offered a lot of ideas of what he wanted to add to the course,” Watts said. “I thought he was very innovate and he does a very good job at connecting with his peers. I think he adds a really great dynamic.”
Allard believes that being a tour guide, a position he has held at URI since last spring, has helped him in his communication abilities. He said that he used his “Tour Guide IQ,” or TGIQ, in his interview for his internship.
According to Allard, having TGIQ simply means that, “when someone asks you a difficult question or you’re not 100 percent sure how to answer something, you have someway to respond to the person that’s pleasant and beneficial to the person and to you.”
Allard hopes to continue to have opportunities to use this TGIQ and looks forward to not just gaining friends and having the ability to network this summer and fall, but to experience the “Disney magic” all over again.