A Spring Internship with the Norfolk Tourism Foundation

For the spring 2026 semester, and my final semester at ODU, I was asked to continue my internship with the Norfolk Tourism Foundation (NTF). For this semester I completely shifted gears and focused on planning for National Travel and Tourism Week. I worked with the marketing team and destination services team to create the survey to decide the 15 winners of the Champions of Hospitality awards they give away to honor the top hospitality and tourism representatives in Norfolk. Once these winners were decided, I organized the planning to surprise the 15 award winners while they were working and honor them with their award.

Spring Internship: Connecting to Career-Readiness Competencies

The following blog post discusses my internship experience and how I was able to develop certain NACE Career-Readiness Competencies. Communication Communication was very important for me to use throughout my internship this semester. I had to keep all the nominators of the award winners updated on when we would be coming to surprise everyone and coordinate the marketing team and destination services team schedules to make sure enough people could attend each surprise. We had

Leah Hallwirth

Spring 2026 Internship Reflection Post

This blog post is a reflection of my spring 2026 internship answering the bolded questions. Share an analysis of what the organization did well to support your internship, and how the organization could improve the experience for future interns. Throughout my internship I was offered the opportunity to work with a lot of different software and collaborate on different pieces that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I helped with some work on Canva, worked in Google and Word to

Leah Hallwirth

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Champions of Hospitality Google Nomination Form

To create this form I used the previous examples and reworked it in a way I thought would be most user friendly. In the end I increased the number of nominations from past years with this form!

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NTTW Press Release

When writing this I was provided previous examples of press releases as well as the branding kit. I used the information I featured in the Google form and that helped with the writing process.

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This is a place holder for more of the work I complete during my internship.