By Meghan Kita

Special to the News-Herald

The first time Caroline Hogg, a Suffolk native, set foot in New York City was on a “career road trip” with the Muhlenberg College Career Center last September.

The second time, she was moving there for a summer position with the Madison Square Garden Company.
“Working in midtown Manhattan has been nothing short of a dream,” said Hogg, a media and communication major with minors in English and film studies. “I’m walking under the Empire State Building every day. I would never have had this opportunity without Muhlenberg.”

During the road trip, Hogg met Dan Asip, director of premium account service at Madison Square Garden, who was on one of that day’s panels. That’s when she learned about the company’s summer student associate program. Hogg stayed in touch: “We talked on the phone, exchanged emails. He passed on my resume.” She got the position after several rounds of phone interviews.

She’s spent her summer working as a group sales student associate at the famous arena. Her day-to-day responsibilities include researching what professional hockey teams elsewhere offer groups in terms of pregame promotions and finding fan clubs on social media for the New York Rangers and New York Knicks, professional hockey and basketball teams, respectively, that play at Madison Square Garden. The fan clubs “turned into leads for our full-time reps to call,” Hogg said.

She was a good fit for the paid, full-time position thanks to her previous work in the group sales department at the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. Long-term, she’s more interested in nonprofit and marketing partnerships — and she got to dabble in both as a summer associate at Madison Square Garden.

One of the highlights of Hogg’s experience was a volunteer day she spent at a camp for children with cancer and their families, which is orchestrated through Madison Square Garden’s Garden of Dreams program. And she worked with a group of other summer associates to come up with a potential partnership between a hospitality business Madison Square Garden owns and a high-end fitness chain; they pitched it to a board of executives at the end of last month.

“Being able to do that with people across multiple departments has been one of the most beneficial parts of this internship,” she says.

As she approaches her senior year, she knows she’d like to land a job in the same field after graduation. “With the sports industry, once you’re in, that’s the easy part. Everyone everywhere knows everybody,” she says. “If this doesn’t turn into a full-time opportunity, there will be others because I was able to intern here at Madison Square Garden.”

Hogg, a 2016 graduate of Nansemond-Suffolk Academy, was a standout basketball player during her years there.