BVU’s Top Tour Guide Now Greets Iowa Wild Fans
Strategic public relations major, Allie Hartman, used a variety of campus experiences, including giving tours to new students, to grow into a career field she’s passionate about.
Perhaps no graduating senior at Buena Vista University this spring knew the campus in Storm Lake as well as Allie Hartman. The Storm Lake native earned honors for giving the most student tours two years in a row. A member of BVU’s Esprit de Corps organization, she served the club as its president while consistently making time to show prospective students and their parents every nook and cranny of the gorgeous lakeside campus.
“Throughout the years, I’ve had students come up to me and say, ‘You gave me my tour,’” Hartman says with a laugh. “I liked being able to show a place I loved. And while I wasn’t an athlete, I liked giving sports tours the most and telling them what I knew from a student perspective.”
Hartman came to know quite a bit about student-athletes on campus even though she didn’t play volleyball or basketball or any other sport. She served as a manager for the Beavers football team for two years. She also photographed nearly every sport at one time or another as a journalist for BVU’s award-winning online newspaper publication, The Tack.
“I’m an office coordinator (for the Iowa Wild) and will help with business functions, merchandising, and whatever else they need me to do, anything from human resources to game-day operations. I’m really excited to get started. This is exactly what I want to be doing.”
Allie Hartman
“Coach (Grant) Mollring liked to have me give tours of the prospective football players because I had knowledge of the football program,” says Hartman, a 2015 graduate of St. Mary’s High School in Storm Lake. “I always tried to find out something about a new students’ high school experience and would do my best to relate it to what they could expect at BVU.”
Hartman, a strategic public relations major with a track in event planning and sport communications, completed an internship in marketing and event planning with the Storm Lake Whitecaps baseball organizations last summer. That experience, plus her involvement at BVU, helped lead her to a position with the Iowa Wild hockey organization in Des Moines. The Wild represent the minor league affiliate of the Minnesota Wild. In starting work with the Wild, of the American Hockey League, Hartman joins a front office that now boasts of four BVU graduates.
“I was supposed to start on March 16, but my start date was pushed back to September because of COVID-19,” says Hartman, who graduated in December. “I’m an office coordinator and will help with business functions, merchandising, and whatever else they need me to do, anything from human resources to game-day operations. I’m really excited to get started. This is exactly what I want to be doing.”
Hartman says her experiences at BVU helped her grow out of her comfort zone, allowing her to communicate effectively and enthusiastically with people she’d never met.
“Trying something a little different, whether it was leading tours or participating on SAB (Student Activities Board) for a year, the experiences helped prepare me for this,” she says. “I had a great experience at BVU. I wouldn’t change a thing.”