Aiming high, they start low

Adam Grossman hated the Red Sox.

But the Cleveland native loved the world of baseball, enough to swallow his Midwestern pride and try to land a summer internship with the Sox. Boston was the one major-league team where Grossman could get his foot in the door: A classmate's dad was a friend of Red Sox president Larry Lucchino .

These days, Grossman vows he is a converted Sox fan. The 24-year-old spent a summer updating rosters, taping games, and picking up lunch for the team's head honchos. He then managed to turn his coveted summer stint into a full-time job, where he rubs elbows with the World Series winners and even gets to hit a few balls in Fenway Park when the team is on the road.

''You get an instant season ticket and watch big deals going down,'' Grossman said. ''There is so much more that happens inside of Fenway.'' As summer internships go, there are resume-builders and there are ''wow'' internships - those rare toeholds in high-profile fields like sports, entertainment, and politics. Grossman and other ''graduates'' of glamorous internships say there is no simple blueprint for nailing down such jobs, and there often isn't any official application. What helps, they say, is to hustle.

People interviewed for this story landed prime gigs, from helping to organize John F. Kerry's presidential campaign to interviewing NASCAR stars before they rev up their engines. And most agree that a combination of contacts, persistence, and a stroke of good luck go a long way to landing alluring internships.

''Network, network, network. It doesn't matter what your parents do ..... you can meet someone along the way who can help you set up your entire life,'' said Michael Braun , a senior at Boston University.

Braun spent last summer doing VIP relations for the Democratic National Convention Committee, which meant he worked as a kind of bodyguard for the pop band Maroon 5 and ended up sharing a bottle of champagne with Ben Affleck . (He has pictures to prove it.) x To get there, Braun said he left a stuffy internship with Clear Channel Communications and contacted a friend from a previous internship with Jive Records. That friend told Braun if he could drop what he was doing and make it up to Boston within days, he had a job waiting with VIP relations at the convention.

For Grossman, now in charge of special projects for the Sox, his big break came in 2002 on the sidelines of a lacrosse field at Duke University . There, just two months from graduation and no job in sight, Grossman chatted with a classmate's father, Brendan Sullivan , about his passion for baseball.

Sullivan, a trial lawyer whose two sons played minor league baseball, offered to write a recommendation letter to his friend Lucchino, who recently had taken over as president of the Red Sox. Grossman seized the offer and had a letter faxed out the next week. Then he spent months peppering Lucchino's secretary with messages, using the key words, ''Brendan Sullivan wrote on my behalf.'' Days after graduating, Grossman finally tracked down Lucchino on the phone. Lucchino talked for a few seconds before transferring the determined Grossman to an internship coordinator. ''Your internship starts next week,'' she said.

Grossman quickly packed his bags, ditched his allegiance to the Cleveland Indians, and headed to Fenway Park.

He then ran up against another reality of the high-profile internship: The work can be pretty low-level. Grossman recalls spending the first two weeks moving boxes of videotapes into storage for $8 an hour.

''The glamorous internships are never all that glamorous,'' Grossman said. For any considering angling for a job in sports, movies, or similar industries, Steven Quigley , an assistant professor at Boston University's College of Communications, offers a note of caution. It can be notoriously difficult to work in the world of celebrities and inflated egos. Quigley said he has seen students bruised by these so-called glamorous experiences, where interns are sometimes given grunt tasks, little respect, and low pay, if any pay at all.

During the Democratic National Convention, Braun says, he had an urgent request from Kerry's daughters to attend a Rock the Vote event - but a co-worker refused to give him the name and number of her contact there. He ended up having to rummage through her files after she left the room.

When his office needed more tickets for another VIP event, the job of scoring new tickets fell to Braun. They discovered that Janeane Garofalo would not be attending, and Braun was told to pretend he was with Garofalo's entourage - and lift the tickets of a celebrity he had never met.

''I had to go to the event and act high and mighty, cutting an entire line of people waiting to pick up tickets and say that I was with Janeane,'' Braun said. ''The guy running the party wanted to meet me, since he loves her, so I chatted him up about getting extra tickets for her crew, so we could have more for ourselves.'' It worked. Braun walked away with Garofalo's tickets, put aside one for himself, and then traded it for a pass onto the convention floor.

For students intent on securing perk-filled internships, Quigley and others recommend reaching out to professors, alumni, employers, friends, and family for potential contacts.

''Your network is much bigger than you think, and enlisting those folks to be your ambassador is hugely helpful to getting your calls returned and your letter opened,'' Quigley said.

Grossman, who now leads the Red Sox internship program, advised students to do their homework on the company before calling, and to find a way to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of others who send resumes. Although repeated phone messages can be annoying, Grossman conceded, ''The calling does help, but only if you can make a name for yourself.'' Denise Ouellet , a race car fanatic, managed to score an internship as a college freshman at the New Hampshire International Speedway by keeping in contact with a NASCAR public relations employee she met during high school.

Ouellet, now a senior at Simmons College , said that an auaintance put her resume into the right hands. As a result, and she has spent the last three summers interviewing drivers such as Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., and passing on their post-race quotes to the media.

It's not always glamorous for Ouellet during the races, though, walking the equivalent of 10 miles in 90-degree weather and wearing a black suit with tire rubber splattered on her face. Still, she said there is no feeling like the roar of 40 stock cars revving around you, B-2s flying overhead, and contributing to an event that millions of people are watching.

''It's something that NASCAR fans only dream about,'' Ouellet said. ''And I was there in the middle of it all.''

Jenn Abelson can be reached at abelson@globe.com.