Disney College Program

Walt Disney World college program

           

I still remember when a friend of mine told me that you could get college credit for going down and doing an internship at Disney World. Although I thought it sounded kinda cool when he mentioned it, I had always felt like if I was gonna move to Florida it would be someplace like Miami, like ya know, by the beach!  It wasn’t until later on when I was walking on campus with the same friend that I got pulled in.  We were walking in the student union building and the WDW college program people had a table set up, so we decided to let them give us the spiel. So it turned out there was to be a full on presentation later that day and that  they were really only there to  try and  get people to come check it out.  I was hesitant to commit until I head two magical words, what were they you ask? FREE PIZZA!!!!! I was sold!

Ironically, my friend that had originally brought the Disney thing to my attention decided that he was gonna skip the presentation, but being the broke college kid that I was, could not pass up the free food.   When I arrived there were probably 30 or 40 other college students there to watch the presentation.  Turns out some of them had driven 5 or 6 hours to listen because their schools were not gonna have the same presentation, and here I was just wanting some pizza!

The presentation itself was cool.  Walt Disney World has a program where students from all over the country and even all over the world head down to Florida and work at Disney and in some cases can get college credit for it.  You could live in housing that they provided (rent came directly out of your paycheck), work an hourly gig at Disney, and attend optional classes on things like business and marketing.  After the presentation I still wasn’t really sure what to think but then I found out that I had to make a decision! The person that gave the interview would be doing interviews the next day, and the next day only so I had to think fast!  I decided might as well interview and just see what happens.

The interview went pretty well too, I know I slam dunked at least a couple of the questions so I was very confident.  At the end we were asked to put all of the possible job categories in order from most to least desirable.  So we would number all of them and after all of the interviews were done the recruiter would decide who to hire and put them in whatever jobs they wanted.  Attractions sounded cool, I also thought it might be cool to work out front letting people in the gates and doing parade control.  One job that almost didn’t get a number next to it at all was custodial.  Sweeping and taking out trash in fact were so low that it lead me to ask the recruiter what the chances of getting any of the positions would be.  She told me that it was competitive and that I should at least rank it low rather than risk not getting anything at all.  So, that’s exactly what I did.  If I recall I ranked it dead last at like 8 out of 8 or 10 out of 10.  I figured I could turn it down if that’s what I got and I decided I really didn’t want to do it.

So of course what happened next is obvious, about a month later I got an offer packet from Disney and what job did I get CUSTODIAL!!!!!!!   I wasn’t completely thrilled, but I was so excited at the idea of getting out of Minnesota that I had decided that I would probably accept any offer that they threw my way.   After informing my parents of the offer and receiving their encouragement, I decided to go for it!!!  Let me point out though that at this point of my life doing something like this seemed kinda crazy to me, it was definitely a little out of character for me to do something that at the time seem so spontaneous.  Not only would this be the first time not living with my parents, but I’d also be living over a thousand miles away.  This was definitely gonna get interesting!