Graduate Students Intern at NBC Covering Olympics

SHU’s state-of-the-art facilities ease transition from classroom to studio

Three Sacred Heart University graduate students earned coveted broadcast internships with NBCUniversal and are now busy making the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing even more exciting for viewers around the world.

Working in the network’s Stamford studios, Shannon Szefinski ’21 and Lucca Pla ’21 are pulling together highlights and editing on the fly as production assistants. Ana Ramos is serving as associate producer for The Olympic Show, which recaps the big stories from the games with clips and athlete interviews.

“I’m very lucky,” said Pla, who will receive his master’s degree in journalism & media production this spring. “Not a lot of people get these kinds of opportunities.”

Pla, who hails from Puerto Rico, is working on NBC’s daytime broadcast, hosted by Rebecca Lowe, a London native known to soccer fans as the face of NBC’s Premier League coverage. Pla scours images from the overnight events, looking for exciting moments to entice viewers. From snowboarding to curling, he and the team set 45-second clips to music with graphic elements and plenty of visual excitement.

“We are editing constantly and preparing sequences, teasing things,” he said. “We focus on American stars. You want to get people excited to see what’s up next.”

Sacred Heart’s School of Communication, Media & the Arts (SCMA) has a long-standing relationship with NBCUniversal, and has a history of helping students secure internships with the network covering the Olympics. Interns have worked in the United States at the broadcast companies’ headquarters and in the host countries.

This year’s interns said they were well prepared for what they found at NBC Sports, a division of NBCUniversal. The studio and control room at SHU’s seven-year-old Frank & Marisa Martire Center for the Liberal Arts is state-of-the-art and similar to professional broadcast and production facilities.

“Sacred Heart has pretty much the same equipment as NBC, so that makes you feel much more comfortable and confident that you can do a good job,” said Ramos, a master’s degree candidate in sports communication and media.

A former producer for Fox Sports Brazil, Ramos is working from noon to midnight during the Olympics. She pours over social media, looking for interesting posts from athletes, fans and celebrities that can be used on The Olympic Show, which airs every day from 8 to 11 a.m. on Peacock.

“I use software called Tagboard, which transforms social media posts into graphics that are ready to air,” she said. “I've been loving it.”

Szefinski studied TV and film production and sports media while an undergraduate student at SHU. A native of Cranford, NJ, she is currently a first-year graduate assistant in the sports communication and media program. Her Olympics odyssey began as a digital production assistant at NBC for the Tokyo Olympics, which were rescheduled from 2020 to 2021 due to the pandemic.

“After the summer of 2021, I instantly knew I wanted to come back for the winter games,” she said. “A few months later, my supervisor reached out to me and asked if I wanted to return, and I was all in.”

Szefinski is spending this Olympics cutting highlights from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., so she can watch the events as they happen in Beijing. She said her NBC supervisors stress storytelling, a skill she honed with SHU professors who taught her how to piece together a compelling tale masterfully.

“It's quite literally all because of Sacred Heart that I began this journey with NBC Sports and the Olympics,” she said. “I probably never would have sent in my initial application my sophomore year if it wasn't for a recruiting event that SHU hosted. I truly owe everything to the University, and even now SHU is being so flexible in allowing me to leave school for three weeks to work. I'm able to experience something amazing.”

Andrew Miller, director of the sports communication and media graduate program, added “We are tremendously proud of our students and alumni working this year’s Olympics, and it continues the tradition of SHU students working every Olympics since Rio 2016. These jobs are evidence of their skill and determination, as well as the commitment of the SCMA faculty to build and support graduate programs that enable SHU students to succeed in the sports media profession.”

Photo captions: Above, grad student Ana Goncalve Ramos (center) with The Olympic Show host Matt Iseman and past Olympic medalists Johnny Moseley (skiing), Brian Boitano (figure skating) and Ashley Wagner (figure skating). Below, Lucca Pla and Shannon Szefinski outside of NBC Sports in Stamford.