Need An Excuse To Stay In Knoxville This Summer?

Mason McLeod
Phi Kappa Psi

Don’t feel like heading home for the summer? Do you need something in Knoxville to do over the summer to keep you here? Apply to be a Sales Exec member for The Odyssey! There are three different titles and a total of five positions. There is Publisher, Assistant Publisher and Sales Exec. The team works together as a whole to sell ad space in The Odyssey over the summer and the following school year.

You make your own schedule, and you decide who you want to talk to about advertising. You can get paid much more than your average minimum wage job that a lot of people get over the summer, and you don’t have to work 9-5, five days a week. You also get the experience of running a small company for a year. The challenges faced and the lessons learned from this job will pay huge dividends down the road. You will never learn as much doing the average “pencil pusher” position as you will on the Sales Exec team of The Odyssey.

The Odyssey is on more than 45 campuses across the country, and the system has been proven to work. So you have the great support structure of the National office, but you also get a huge amount of leeway in what you like to do with our specific campus. It is up to this leadership exec to make sure the paper is ready each week as well. The publishers play a vital role in the production of the paper each week from writing their own article to making sure advertisers are happy.

This past year was The Odyssey’s first year on UT’s campus. Our current Sales Exec team really laid the foundation for future success. That’s why we would like to start hiring next year’s Exec and “show them the ropes” over the closing months of this semester so that they can hit the ground running when the summer comes around. These positions are a lot like the Exec positions in your Chapter. They come with challenges you haven’t faced before, but at the end of the day, you know you learned from it and are happy you took on the challenge.

The sooner we can start training the next Exec, the better. We are accepting applications for every position. All three of the different positions are paid. Both of the Publisher positions have a hands-on role with the paper week to week and work on selling ad space, while the Sales Exec positions are really just focused on ad sales. All of these positions require around 30 to 40 hours of work a week during the summer to get the paper ready for the school year, and during the school year, your work is cut back to around 10 to 15 hours a week. I guarantee you will learn much more in this position than you will by heading home for the summer and doing whatever makeshift job you can pull together.

If you want to be considered for any of these positions, please just email me at my email address listed below. Or if you have any questions about the position, feel free to email me as well. We want to start forming next year’s team as soon as possible, so get your application in before the rest start flying in. The freedom to make your own schedule and the ability to gain valuable sales and leadership experience goes a long way. I cannot recommend applying for one of the positions enough. Take the time to think about it, and if you are lucky enough, you could have one fun and exciting summer ahead.

Mason is a junior studying logistics. You may contact him at mason@odyssey-central.com.