Travel up the Atlantic coast of Florida and you’ll hit Daytona Beach, home to NASCAR Headquarters and the annual Daytona 500 NASCAR race. NASCAR is a household name, but maybe you’ve never heard of the Nascar Diversity Internship Program (NDIP), a 10-week program for college students that offers hands-on experience across various roles in the motorsports industry.
Chandler Love, a UM senior studying human resource management and psychology, is wrapping up her time in the NDIP as an intern in NASCAR’s Human Resources (HR) department.
One of 37 students in the program, Love makes up a class of diverse students with interests in business, engineering, broadcasting and communications, all gaining practical job experience as they work alongside NASCAR professionals.
“I’ve honestly gotten a chance to dip into a little bit of everything with HR,” Love said.
One of her long-term projects has been revamping the NASCAR University website.
“Before it was a very antiquated, hard-to-navigate site, so I’ve tried to make it easy to navigate, visually appealing and then have relevant course content in there,” Love said.
No two days working at NASCAR look the same. In addition to revamping the company’s learning tools, she also helped with employee engagement and wellness initiatives, kept HR postings on par with state and federal requirements and held informational interviews among other tasks.
“I have a lot of access to how NASCAR is trying to improve the employee experience,” Love said. “And I would love to keep making an impact on that — you know, standardizing processes and just making everyone’s job as easy as possible.”
The program introduces students to real-life work in the field. One case study project allowed Love to devise a marketing brand plan to promote the auto racing sport to younger and more diverse audiences.
“I definitely had to learn how to work with different and big and bold personalities and really collaborate to make sure that we had a good end product,” Love said. “We presented that to executives, so that was a great opportunity to practice my presentation skills as well.”
Her overall internship experience has helped Love expand her network and taught her how to turn feedback into the desired end product.
“Being able to come into a really well-recognized company — into a bigger corporate environment — has made me definitely realize that that’s an environment that I do really well in,” Love said.
Despite her current accomplishments, a career in HR has not always been the goal for Love.
“I had no idea what I wanted to do, honestly,” Love said. “All of the typical jobs you hear like lawyer, doctor — I just knew that wasn’t for me.”
After attending a career event in high school and hearing a woman from the Weather Channel’s HR team speak about her job, Love decided to pursue a career in the field. Since then, she’s solidified her conviction to work in HR through networking and an internship last summer.
UM has played a vital role in building the budding professional’s experience within the HR industry, specifically through the Human Resource Management (MGT 302) course. Love credits this class with giving her the foundation to navigate the HR world at NASCAR.
Love was initially drawn to the Miami Herbert Business School’s front-loaded curriculum where students take business classes in their first year. This initiative sets Miami Herbert apart from schools that encourage freshmen to complete general education requirements first.
“It was honestly amazing to do an accounting class, a marketing class, a business law class and really get to narrow down more of what I wanted to do,” Love said. “Seeing all those other sides of the business has given me a much greater perspective on what it takes to run a business outside of the HR piece.”
Connecting with business school professors has been an influential part of her undergraduate experience.
“They’ve really made a point to develop me professionally as well as in the classroom,” Love said.
Outside of the classroom, the UM senior works as an office assistant in the School of Education, Office of Graduate Studies.
“It was honestly great practice on how to conduct myself in an office environment, how to handle dealing with superiors and how to handle my customer service skills,” Love said.
After graduating from UM next May, the rising senior hopes to get her HR certification and find a job where she combines both her love of sports and HR work.
“I definitely wanna make a big impact on company culture and make wherever I work the best place to work than it possibly can be,” Love said.
Students interested in the NDIP can learn more about the internship here and stay informed when next year’s program dates and application timeline are announced.