Here's an interview with Mat Repchak about the Citrus Bowl, one of the top-flight college football bowl games. This interview is particularly interesting for its outlook on community and tourism. My name is Matt Repchak. I am the Senior Director of Marketing and Media for Florida Citrus Sports in Orlando, Florida. We are actually a non-profit event management organization in Orlando focused in events around Camping World Stadium, formerly the Citrus Bowl stadium, that include two bowl games, the original Citrus Bowl, now the Camping World Bowl. An opening season college kickoff game last year was Florida State, Ole Miss. We help with a Black College game within the state of Florida, Florida A&M University and Bethune-Cookman, the Florida Blue Florida Classic. We were the local organizing group for the Pro Bowl when it came to Orlando, and then a couple of other events that come up over the course of the year. Our mission is to raise money through those events and then invest it back in the neighborhood surrounding the stadium. At one point, it was known as one of the poorest zip codes in Orange County, Florida in our city. So, as part of reconstruction of Camping World Stadium, which we were a big part of, we've refocused our charitable efforts from a countywide focus to a neighborhood focus within about a square mile of the stadium, focused in some key areas that help develop the quality of life for the residents that live right around the stadium itself. The skills that have been really valuable for us are agility, resilience, attention to detail, critical thinking, some things that don't necessarily apply to any specific degree program but are things that a journalism degree or communications degree or a sports marketing degree kind of facilitate in a way. We pivot from running a media operation for a soccer match or assisting with it at least into a summer camp program that's happening for residents in our neighborhood, and we handle that with the same staff regardless. So, the ability to manage multiple projects is important, and the skills that come up being able to apply your either learning through a degree program or just applied experience across a whole multitude of different projects and tasks is kind of the most critical thing. There's some functional things that I had to learn in my first couple of years that I would have spent some time on if I had gone back. I think by the time I graduated, we could see a little bit of where journalism was going but it was theoretical. I think knowing now what I know I would have said I need to learn some basic radio audio production, be set up for simple things like podcasting. The video stuff, video linear editing I learned on the fly as I was going, that would be helpful. Some functional tasks like that are useful. I think I got a good sense of editorial decision-making, but I think if I had a chance to think about it or just go about it again, I would have approached some of my education of what are the places, what are the world outside of journalism where this would apply, where does the learning here become universal, whether I'm working for a media outlet or for a brand or any other organization. So, some things that we're getting into now more heavily for content strategy and messaging that I feel like I have a foundation to do it, but maybe some specific tactics and practices, I would have preferred to learn. Then, one of the things that Medill has done well is give you that opportunity to reach outside of the basic journalism, to enrich your experience, to fill it out with general studies. So, I would have focus my general studies a little bit more and to some areas that I felt I would have filled out my background a little bit more. Beyond the basic functional things, just understanding the world, maybe business probably would have been a bit a little bit more helpful for me at the time then than what I was taking. So, it's really going back and taking the things that I learned on the fly or learned on the job. There's some areas where I probably could have been set up a little bit better my first few years if I had reconsidered it.