I chose Loughborough because of its leading performance in the global sports industry. By studying at the world's best sports-related university I knew I would have lots of opportunities to be inspired by excellent people around me.
One of the greatest things I found about the course is the chance to practice what is taught after lectures.
The practical sessions and assignments are well-designed to push you to find a balance between feasibility and creativity for your project. As my study is progressing, I have increasingly seen how important it is to be creative and flexible when making sports marketing strategies.
Loughborough has provided me with a contemporary insight into the global sports market. Following graduation, I am planning to further study how to make sports marketing decisions by relying on data, while building my knowledge of business analysis and statistics tools.
It is really impressive that we have a whole range of academic support and tutors here to help. Whenever you get stuck in your study, the tutors give great feedback or point you to the right person.
In my second year, I spent a lot of time building my CV and finding internship opportunities. It can be hard at first when facing a blank resume, but the Coach and Volunteer Academy helps a lot by offering a range of opportunities.
The team at the Careers Network are very professional and easy to reach out to. Just pop into the booth on campus and you will receive advice for each stage of securing a job. I also joined the courses held by the University Language Centre several times and it built me many important academic skills.
Instead of taking a placement year, I decided to find a summer internship and come back to campus in Autumn. Since my interests are mainly in data-based sports market analysis and consultancy, I searched several sports companies in this field and reached out to their managers.
I got a chance to join the market research team of Nielson Sports, one of the leading data-driven sports consultancy companies. Under the instruction of the senior researcher, I carried out projects including “Hisense x PSG”, “Hisense x Inter Milan” and “Jingdong x LPL”. These projects investigated the impact of sponsorship campaigns on brands’ perceived image among the target audience.
My work included collecting demographic characteristics, framing questionnaires, digging into data, drawing user profiles, and finally helping understand what the most valuable assets and most appropriate marketing metrics were in the sponsors’ target market.
From here I put the marketing theory in lectures into practice, providing me with a deeper insight into how synergy can be created between sponsors and brands. It felt great when I realized those marketing theories started to make sense in different contexts.