David Korzeniowski ‘20 joins us to talk about how Notre Dame, his internships, and the Alumni Network helped him find his path post-graduation. Currently a graduate student at Northwestern, David talks about working with NBC at Notre Dame football games, calling baseball games for the Falmouth Falcons, and the way Notre Dame alumni helped him decide to pursue graduate school.
David Korzeniowski ‘20 joins us to talk about how Notre Dame, his internships, and the Alumni Network helped him find his path post-graduation. Currently a graduate student at Northwestern, David talks about working with NBC at Notre Dame football games, calling baseball games for the Falmouth Falcons, and the way Notre Dame alumni helped him decide to pursue graduate school.
FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)
00:00:10:17 - 00:00:18:05
Welcome to College Bound, Notre Dame Admissions' podcast. We're so excited to continue sharing what's unique about Notre Dame.
00:00:18:07 - 00:00:34:22
I'm Maria Finan, an assistant director in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. I'm a "Double Domer," so I received both my bachelor's and master's degrees at Notre Dame, and I'm here with my co-host Matt Greene, who will introduce himself and also our special guests for this week.
00:00:35:04 - 00:01:17:21
Hello, everyone. My name is Matt Greene, like always, alongside Maria Finan, and here I am also an Assistant Director of Admissions. I am a Notre Dame graduate of the Class of 2016, and I studied American Studies while I was at Notre Dame. Today we are going to talk about jobs and internships that are available to students, and resources for finding those as well as the strength of the Notre Dame alumni network, tying into relationships as well as connecting students with those jobs and internships, and to talk about that with us is our special guest and a friend of two of us, David Corsonowsky, David would you like to introduce yourself tell everybody who you are.
00:01:18:15 - 00:01:43:22
Absolutely. Thanks Matt. Maria happy to be back with you guys. My name is David Corsonowski, I am a graduate of the class of 2020. I majored in Film, Television and Theater at Notre Dame with minors in journalism as well as history. I lived in O'Neill Hall best dorm on campus of course. And right now I'm actually a graduate school at Northwestern University pursuing a Masters of Science and Journalism focused on sports media.
00:01:43:26 - 00:02:19:14
Awesome, thanks so much David, it's really great to have you back with us this week. We're gonna be diving into all things related to jobs, internships, career, and Notre Dame has so many kind of different support for that, whether it's the Center for Career Development, helping you really hone in on skills that you possess and discern what are you passionate about, we also have Career and Internship fairs which in traditional years happen on campus but a lot of things are kind of virtual this year. David, we thought you'd be a great person to talk to having just recently graduated from Notre Dame, and we'd love to hear a little bit about your internship experiences.
00:02:19:16 - 00:02:29:27
So I know you interned with NBC as a student and that you're still working with them. Can you kind of talk about how you got involved with that and kind of what you've done with them and what that looks like maybe currently for you as well.
00:02:30:00 - 00:03:00:11
Yeah, absolutely. I would say my internship/part-time job with NBC was probably one of the coolest things that I got to be a part of when I was a student at Notre Dame. So one of my friends, Holden Perrelli, who I worked with in broadcasting, he reached out to me the summer before sophomore year because he had worked for NBC helping out Kathryn Tappin, who's the sideline reporter for Notre Dame football and NBC, he worked with her and the NBC team our freshman year.
00:03:00:13 - 00:03:44:06
So that was the infamous 2016 season when they went 4-8, but he called me and he said that they were looking for some more help, and they were looking for a student worker to be the director spotter. So long story short I ended up interviewing with the NBC producer Rob Hyland and the NBC director Pier Mousa. Those are the two guys who really run the NBC broadcast, so everything you see on TV when you watch Notre Dame football, they're pulling the strings on that. So I worked with them and I was basically up on the 50 yard line and the Duncan Student Center, and I had a pair of binoculars and I was pointing out players and formations. I was speaking those into a headset, which was then going into Pier Mousa, the director's, ear.
00:03:44:10 - 00:04:12:07
So I was basically helping out and I got to meet a lot of really cool people. Pier and Rob were high at the top of that list, but I also got to meet Mike Tirico and Doug Flutie. So I did that for three years and it was an unbelievable experience. I got my senior game off, so I was able to enjoy tailgating and being in the student section for the Notre Dame vs. BC game, but it was such a valuable experience and I learned so much about life TV and sports. And that's really what I want to get into.
00:04:12:09 - 00:04:41:25
Now the cool thing, guys, is that because I'm in Chicago right now, I told NBC that you know I was available if they needed me, so I'm really excited because this upcoming week, it's probably gonna be in the past once this podcast comes out, but the Notre Dame-Louisville game, I'll be back working in a different and maybe even a bigger role helping out spotting for Mike Terico in the broadcast booth. So it's really exciting. I'm so happy to have been a part of that team and I really don't think I could've done it anywhere else because Notre Dame's contract with NBC is so unique.
00:04:42:02 - 00:05:11:03
As two Notre Dame alarms and big superfans of fighting Irish football, it's awesome that you get to do that and call plays and interact with some of these people we see on a weekly basis when we watch the game. So you got on the ground level with your friend and that's such an awesome thing that happens so much, when you connect internships and jobs and those availabilities with Notre Dame students. But you've also done some really cool things over the summers, too, especially with baseball broadcasting- so could you talk about your internship with the Falmouth Commodores.
00:05:11:05 - 00:05:44:22
Yes, sure. So that was an internship that I had for two summers, the summers before my junior and senior years. So for those who don't know, the Falmouth Commodores are one of the ten teams in the Cape Cod Baseball League, so that's a summer league for really, really highly touted college players who are trying to get drafted. So with these guys and a lot of sports, there's really no off season; even during the summer, you want to be impressing scouts trying to improve your job stock, and the Cape Cod League as is probably the premier summer baseball league for those really, really good college baseball players.
00:05:45:16 - 00:06:19:06
The number of players who get drafted in the MLB draft, a ton of them are alumni of the Cape League. So I was the Commodores play by play broadcaster, meaning I traveled with the team for this season of about forty-five games. So that was the first time that I really full-time was working as a broadcaster because it was day in day out. You know sometimes five or six games a week double headers and that really you know initiated me into what the career is like, what the lifestyle is like, what the preparation that is entailed sort of requires. And
00:06:19:08 - 00:06:59:24
And again I met some really cool people from a lot of different universities like Syracuse, Northwestern, Arizona State, and University of Miami, and I found that my experience at Notre Dame really set me up to be a leader and also really produce well for this team so you know we worked together and covered the games in terms of live broadcasts but also show so media interviewing players coaches. So that was two summers and it was some of the best experiences I've had in my young career, and definitely Notre Dame set me up well in terms of building resumes and cover letters and getting those interviews eventually getting that summer internship with the Commodores.
00:06:59:26 - 00:07:29:06
It's great to hear about the fusion of sports and also the arts and media because I think all of those things really are so present at Notre Dame, and we have a lot of alumni working in those fields and other fields that they're really passionate about. For any of you who are kind of wondering you know how do we find these jobs and internships. Notre Dame has a lot of different ways that students are able to do that. Irish Compass is one of those, it's kind of Notre Dame's own version of LinkedIn, which is really great for networking and things like that, which we'll talk about in just a second.
00:07:29:08 - 00:08:08:15
We have a job database called Handshake, so maybe you're somebody who's really location specific or you're somebody who just wants to work in a certain field regardless of what it is you are passionate about and what you want to study within six months of graduation, 98% of all of our students, regardless of what they've studied have found that next step. So for many students that's a full time job. It might be graduate school it could be full time service entering the military or kind of other professional opportunities but that's one of those great pieces that regardless of what you study at Notre Dame, if you're passionate about it, we have resources, we have a support network to make sure you can kind of find that next step.
00:08:08:17 - 00:08:27:21
And I think my favorite resource is our alumni network. We have over two hundred and thirty domestic clubs. And David I know you're at Northwestern now, but that wasn't kind of the original plan. Do you want to talk about kind of what you were planning to do after graduation and then also how you got where you are right now at Northwestern and what your path there looked like.
00:08:27:24 - 00:09:13:08
Totally, and Maria, I think you said it really well, because that Notre Dame alumni base was so crucial for me when COVID hit. I had a job lined up with the minor league baseball team called the Orem Owlz. So they are the rookie league affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels located in Orem, Utah. So that was gonna be a similar type job to what I hadn't filmed except it was actually professional baseball. It was a paid position. It would have been my first job in the field, but then COVID hit in March, and sports were one of the first things to go. The NBA and the NFL were postponed, and a lot of the sports to really suffer were those lower league sports because they didn't have the funding and the resources that the NBA has to go and set up a bubble in Orlando.
00:09:13:10 - 00:09:48:13
So Minor League baseball was canceled completely this summer, meaning rookie league all the way through Triple-A, so that cost a lot of people their jobs, and I had to change my plans as well. Originally I was was hoping to hit the ground running and start calling games, but then I realized that you know sports are going to take a while to get back to where they used to be, so what did I do? I tapped into that alumni base. So I went onto the Notre Dame love nice site linked in handshake all of these resources that Maria just talked about and I thought OK what's Notre Dame that's in this field that I would really like to talk to.
00:09:48:15 - 00:10:18:26
And I found a ton of people. I talked to Ted Robinson, who broadcast for NBC Sports for a long time, and Mike Monaco an alumni of Notre Dame and of O'Neill Hall, actually, who I had worked with previously, is currently a full time broadcaster with ESPN. He's done some Red Sox games. Mike Golic, Jr. is a guy who played football at Notre Dame and his dad Mike Golic was one of the cohosts of the famous Mike and Mike radio show. He has his own radio show now.
00:10:26:19 - 00:10:51:18
I mean, I was astounded and overwhelmed and super excited to see how many people were in this field that I wanted to go into, so cold e-mails, mutual contacts, reaching out and saying "Hey, I'm a recent alumni of Notre Dame, do you have some time to talk?" And I found that everyone was super willing to talk, gave great advice, and it showed sort of that camaraderie among Notre Dame alumni during what was really a challenging time for a lot of people.
00:10:51:20 - 00:11:15:18
You know for myself and a lot of kids in the class of 2020, COVID definitely threw a wrench into some postgraduate plans, but those conversations allowed me to work on my resume and work on my reel, and ended up sort of opening the door to my application to Northwestern. And that's a program that I'm really excited to be in, but I don't think I would be in if it wasn't for those conversations and that solid alumni network that Notre Dame has.
00:11:15:20 - 00:11:39:13
You might say "Oh, Notre Dame alumni are going to look out for their own," but you're a true testament to how that is very, very true, that Notre Dame alumni are definitely going to look out for their own and you could tap into the Notre Dame alumni network with anything whether it be jobs, or just really just advice and connecting to a community. One final question for you David how do you feel like Notre Dame set you and your classmates up for success after graduation?
00:11:39:24 - 00:12:15:28
Yeah, that's a good question. I feel like a lot of kids who are looking at Notre Dame or are younger students at Notre Dame- that's the money question, right? It's like, "How is this school going to set me up and get me started on the career that I want to get into?" And what I've found is, you know, if you're passionate about something and you know what field you want to go into, and even for people who don't (who are a little uncertain), that Notre Dame alumni network and the resources that are there at Notre Dame get you on a really really good path. Like for me, I've known I wanted to do broadcasting for a while, like since like middle school or like high school.
00:12:16:24 - 00:12:56:13
And Notre Dame, those conversations that I had and the work experience that I had really allowed me to get off going on the right foot and get into this program at Northwestern. And it's not just exclusive for me or the FTT major; I know good friends who were in Mendoza who have awesome jobs and postgraduate plans in that field. I have friends who were in medical school, friends in engineering who are off to a really good start in that field, and I think that it speaks to even with COVID, if that's what my friends are doing right now, it shows just how strong you know Notre Dame really is and how it sets people up.
00:12:56:23 - 00:13:30:09
Fighting Irish Media was was one of the best resources that I had. I think it goes up against any you know broadcasting school in the country. And I know that friends feel the same about Mendoza in the business school, that's one of the best in the country with a solid alumni network in Chicago, New York, and other cities. So that's the short answer of how Notre Dame set me up, but I'm so grateful to have gone there, and I'm looking forward to you know staying in touch with these alumni and in context that I've built up in relationships that I've built in the future years.
00:13:30:18 - 00:13:57:25
Definitely, well, David, you know you always have a home at Notre Dame, and hopefully your career will continue to bring you back here or maybe into the professional arena with other Notre Dame alumni. I think I speak for both Matt and I and a lot of other Notre Dame alumni when we say it's great to see one of our own doing well and we just can't wait to see what's next for you. But thank you for sharing all about internships and the different resources that have helped you.
00:13:57:27 - 00:14:25:06
For those of you listening, Matt and I are really excited to conclude Season 1 next week. Next week will be our final episode of the season. We'll be joined by some current first year students to tell you all about their first year at Notre Dame. In the meantime, if you'd like to connect with us, you can visit our website or send us a message on Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat @NDAdmissions. You can also connect with us on Facebook @NotreDameAdmissions.