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 of the 15 separate surprises for the award winners while they were working to honor them with their award.

Champions of Hospitality Award Winners

Morgan Gutterman Granby Theater

Ursula Miles
MacArthur Memorial

Brian Munn
Four Eleven York

Thomas Howerton
Omar's Carriage House

Hospitality Team
Virginia Stage Company

Evan Bookout
Mermaid Winery

This is a clip of me explaining the award to the Virginia Stage Company team with their reaction

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!

Press the button below to see the full form in paper version:

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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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Champions of Hospitality PDCA

This is the PDCA I wrote about the nomination and selection process for the Champions of Hospitality awards that occurred during the course of my internship.

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A Spring Internship with the Norfolk Tourism Foundation

Champions of Hospitality Award Winners

Morgan Gutterman Granby Theater

Ursula Miles MacArthur Memorial

Brian Munn Four Eleven York

Thomas Howerton Omar's Carriage House

Hospitality Team Virginia Stage Company

Evan Bookout Mermaid Winery

This is a clip of me explaining the award to the Virginia Stage Company team with their reaction

Spring Internship: Connecting to Career-Readiness Competencies

Spring 2026 Internship Reflection Post

Champions of Hospitality Google Nomination Form

NTTW Press Release

Champions of Hospitality PDCA

Ursula Miles
MacArthur Memorial

Brian Munn
Four Eleven York

Thomas Howerton
Omar's Carriage House

Hospitality Team
Virginia Stage Company

Evan Bookout
Mermaid Winery