I interviewed a recent graduate of Nova Southeastern and she used to be a coworker at the RecPlex with me for two years. She is now working part time at the planet fitness and she does some accounting work because she studied math at NSU. I chose her even though her and career goal is not the same as mine because I really respect the way she carries herself professionally and she has been a mentor of mine professionally for some time. I have been super interested in her transition into the professional work force and seeing what I can learn from her like I did in our time together at NSU. She describes leadership at the planet fitness as similar to the kind at RecPlex. It is important to be firm and stand on your policies as gym clientele can be hard headed and resistant to rules. However, you still need to be friendly and engaging, working on building relationships that will keep people coming back. I find this is something I will definitely have to balance in my professional career. As a physical therapist, I will be asking people to do very challenging things and they will have a lot of resistance due to fear or pride. It will be my job to give them the structure to hold them accountable while also making sure they know I care about them as a person and that they succeed. She also talked about how leaders at the gym have to manage a staff with a lot of different talents because everyone has a specific position and teaches or trains a specific thing. Putting people in position that fits them best is crucial for their success. Although this can be intimidating or seem like there isn’t room to fit in I think this is a great kind of work environment as it has great room to create opportunity for yourself and lean into you strengths and lean on the strengths of others. She has somewhat limited global engagement in her daily career however she does have to work with a very diverse clientele living in south Florida. There is a wide variety of people who come to train and they all want o accomplish different things. It is her job to be open and adapt to help them succeed. This is of course something I will have to embrace living in a diverse community and especially because I hope my facility is open and welcoming to kind of person from anyone in the world. It would be cool if my facility was actually known for being welcoming and well equipped to help people from local and international backgrounds equally. I’d even love to promote internationalization in my facility in little ways like how they do in the office of international affairs with little flags on the wall. One thing I have always respected Jennie for is the way she has always commanded respect from her coworkers despite some of the challenges that come with being a minority female especially in a very male dominated industry. From her answer and our conversation this does not seem to have changed in her knew work environment despite the people in it becoming more experienced, and older which can often mean more prejudice nd resistant to change. I will definitely hang on to how she says she gets that respect. She told me she just always makes sure she is working as hard as anyone else, being as honest and fair with people as possible, and holding herself and others to a standard both can meet and be proud of. In my field their will always always always be someone with more schooling or more experience or who has higher profile clients and having Jennie’s ability to give and get respect will be vital to my ability to position myself for growth in my career. When it comes to strategies of breaking into the field she told me all the things I Know I need to work on and have been trying to work on. She reminded me of always making sure that people in the fields you want to work in know you and what you want and you have to be the person to introduce yourself and tell them. She has a phrase I like that goes “closed mouths don’t get fed”. I like that because its always easy to stay in your comfort zone or try and not rock the boat but as long as you do it respectfully it’s important to know when to speak up and let people know what you want. This is one thing I think I especially need to work on before I hit the professional world. I think That I have too much of a tendency to put my needs last or not tell people what I want and that often leads to unneeded sacrifice or missed opportunities. In my career every opportunity could be huge so it would suck to miss out on something just because someone didn’t know I wanted it.