Alex Aguirre is officially living life in the fast lane.
The Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism graduate spent the month of May in a whirlwind. He’s a marketing intern at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), which hosted two major events last month—the Grand Prix and the Indy 500. Beyond all the preparation and work for IMS, he also served as the College of Health’s undergraduate commencement speaker.
“I really feel like sports touch almost everyone, so that was the focus of my speech,” he said. “The nerves completely went away when I got up there, and I knew exactly what I was going to say.”
A San Francisco native, Aguirre moved to Utah to attended The Waterford School before committing to Marquette University. Originally, he planned to pursue a degree in physical therapy, but Milwaukee didn’t feel like home. He moved back at the start of the pandemic and took a gap year so he could figure out what to do next.
“I knew I wanted to go back to school, so I enrolled at the University of Utah,” he said. “I found out about the PRT degree with the sports management emphasis and knew it perfectly aligned with what I wanted to do. I had a conversation with Eric Gardner, the department’s academic advisor, and just kind of ran with it.”
Once he’d figured out his career path, Aguirre jumped right in. He scored valuable internships with Utah Football, Real Salt Lake, and the Utah Royals. Last fall, he started looking for opportunities on a national scale and found an internship with IMS.
“I was putting out as many applications as I could and IMS contacted me,” he said. “They interviewed me within hours of sending that email, I had two more rounds of interviews that week, and they offered me the job the next week.”
Aguirre moved to Indianapolis to start his internship in January, which quickly ramped up ahead of a busy spring schedule. He joined the field marketing team and spent his days helping coordinate and execute events across the state of Indiana. The events reach plenty of motor sports fans, but they also reach local community members who may not have the means to attend an event.
“I was in charge of Indy 500 Community Day, and we brought Indy 500 drivers to 10 different elementary schools in Indianapolis,” he said. “It was a lot of work but so fulfilling. It gave the kids a chance to experience the race in a different way.”
After all the work drumming up excitement about the race, the big day finally arrived. Aguirre didn’t have any previous experience in motor sports, and the traditions and spectacles blew him away.
“On race day at 6 am, fireworks and cannons go off to signal this is it,” he said. “We had two F-16 flyovers and then had Blackhawk helicopters do a lap around the track, no more than a few hundred feet above the ground. The 350,000 people in a 2.5-mile oval is kind of crazy and surreal. ”
Those memories stick with you for life, and Aguirre’s experience in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism perfectly teed him up for his work in sports. One semester-long project introduced him to event planning, which he was able to scale up to an event for thousands of people during his internship. His Business of Sport class with Preston Tanner gave him valuable skills in Microsoft Excel that have translated into the workplace.
“I feel so comfortable going up to my senior director of marketing to ask for anything, and my relationship with professors built that up, ” he said. “I really developed my communication skills in my PRT core classes.”
After Aguirre wraps up his internship at IMS, he hopes to continue with the organization in a more permanent role. But if not, he’s making plenty of connections with the multiple pro teams in the area, so a future in sports looks like a safe bet.
“The culture here is unmatched, so I’d love to stay if the opportunity arose,” he said. “I want to continue to work in marketing or community outreach. My bigger goal is to bring sports to more people.”