Gordon Atkins, age 19
Company: Daytona Cubs
Location: Daytona, Fla.
At the beginning of his fall 2008 semester at Williams College, Gordon Atkins made a list of all the baseball teams in cities where he knew he could find a place to crash. There were only five.
He contacted them all, and by November, he'd landed a gig with the Minor League Baseball's Daytona Cubs as one of 15 unpaid interns. (To make the trip possible, he secured a grant from his school.)
As glamorous as working for a professional baseball team may sound, Atkins's gig isn't all fun and games. The economics major does spend some time making sales calls, organizing promotional events, and choosing music to play during games, but he also picks up trash, hawks concessions, and sells tickets. He now even knows what it's like to visit bars dressed as the Cubs' bear mascot, Cubby. ("Fortunately, the mascot is really well liked," Atkins says.)
But he doesn't complain: Learning the business from top to bottom has been worthwhile, Atkins says. And combined with his econometrics background, it's given him a few business ideas -- for how to exploit weather patterns, for instance -- that he hopes to pitch.
NEXT: Rae Shih, age 21
