It was the spring of 2020, and Maggie Harrison, a senior at IU, was living her dream in Orlando, Florida, participating in the Disney college program. She was in the middle of a shift when a guest informed her that the amusement park was shutting down because of the coronavirus. She assumed it had to be some sort of mistake, but the following day she received an email that the college program was ending and she had three days to move out. That same day, she got a call that her summer internship with Royal Caribbean Cruises was also scrapped due to COVID-19. The following week, she opened up a rejection letter for something else she had applied for that she had her heart set on doing.
“It was hard to digest what felt to me was all kinds of failure,” says Harrison. “I thought I had a really clear path for what I wanted to do after graduation and then my life was turned upside down.”
She saw a job posting for Sea World and kept asking to apply, but she repeatedly was told that they needed someone to fill the position immediately and she wasn’t graduating until May. But then the hiring manager had a change of heart and scheduled an interview. The week before her interview, she got word that the Executive Vice President reviewed her resume and wanted to talk to her right away. Following a 20-minute phone call with him, she was offered the job.
“It’s an absolutely insane experience to go from feeling so hopeless—like, ‘I’m going to graduate without a job and have to live in my parent’s basement’ to, ‘OMG, I just landed a job in my dream industry!’”
Even though most of her Kelley peers were pursuing careers in banking or consulting, she wanted to pursue her passion of working in the theme park industry, so she couldn’t be more thrilled to land a job as a revenue management analyst at Sea World Parks & Entertainment where she analyzes ticket sales and historical attendance trends for Sea World Orlando and Aquatica. The Kelley School prepared her well for the role. For starters, professors at Kelley taught her how to learn quickly and be adaptable and flexible.
“I learned how to digest and use a lot of content in a short amount of time, and that’s been really valuable,” says Harrison, who moved to Orlando just four days after graduation.
Sea World is going through a rebranding period with a lot of growth right now and Harrison appreciates being in a space with so much change.
“This company has been around for 60 years, yet it’s basically like working for a startup,” she says.
In 2019, Harrison travelled to Japan for X272.
“I wanted to go somewhere I’d be scared to go to by myself, and the Japanese language barrier was intimidating to me,” says Harrison. Thankfully, in Japan numbers are universal so she was able to navigate public transit as long as she knew her number stops. She convinced her dad to meet her in Tokyo and the pair visited Disneyland to feed her passion for tourism.
“It was cool to see their operations in Japan and how they were different from the U.S.,” says Harrison, who plans to buzz around different theme parks in her free time to check out all of the rollercoasters. She recently visited Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure to ride their new VelociCoaster.
Though she’s super busy now since her role requires some on-call weekend shifts, she hopes to return to Bloomington in the future to help with the Young Women’s Institute (YWI), a college program for high school students who are going into their senior year. Advice she gives incoming freshmen is pretty simple: find your own path and pursue it.
“Don’t let the typical Kelley path dissuade you from what you want to do,” she says. “If you have a passion, stay true to yourself.”
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