I’m starting to lose track of how many cover letters I’ve written, clips I’ve put together and times I’ve edited my resumé this week.
It’s internship application season in the School of Mass Comm, and anyone who plans on being successful post-graduation better be out there looking, applying and connection-building right now. All of this reminds me of my senior year of high school when I had to apply to colleges.
Make sure you fill out the application.
Pay the fees.
Send in your transcripts.
Write a kick-ass essay that shows them why you deserve to be there.
Yeah, I think it’s just like applying to colleges.
I’m realizing that with each program I apply to, I’m learning a little bit more about myself. When writing a cover letter, I have to ask myself why I’m applying for the program in the first place, and what is it about it that makes it so interesting and makes me think it will be beneficial? It’s not about the money for me (some of them don’t even pay), and I’m not even sure if it’s about the bylines anymore.
I’m looking for an internship because I want the real world experience, and to prove to everyone that I can handle a job in the professional work place. I want to tell powerful stories, present information to the public in new innovative ways, and to expand on all of the crazy ideas I’m being told in my journalism classes about where the media industry is headed.
Today in class we watched a storytellers presentation where the speaker was talking about how no one knows for sure where the field of journalism is going. People who say its dying are close-minded, and those who think it’ll grow beyond belief aren’t completely for sure either. But because nobody knows, the possibilities are endless.
To me, it’s kind of exhilarating walking into the realm of endless possibilities.
I like waking up every morning and never knowing what’s going to happen. It keeps things interesting, and being blind sided by the day-to-day can also lead to some pretty interested story telling. I’ve been asked a couple of times in the last week about what it was like being a Hearst Award Finalist last semester (top 20, breaking news competition), and I can’t honestly say that it changed my impression of that story at all.
What I do remember about the day that I wrote the story nominated for Hearst is this: I was sitting in the newsroom checking my Facebook, and the bloody piece of chicken photo was plastered all over my newsfeed. I couldn’t get away from it, and fellow students were commenting, liking and sharing that photo all day long. I think by the time we went to print, the likes were in the thousands and the shares and comments in the hundreds. It was crazy watching it all happen, and because it was the talk of campus for the day, it became a story.
I dug deeper on that story than simply reporting that students were pissed off. I tried talking to dining to see what their stance was on the issue. I met with the student who posted the photo to find out what he thought of the pic going viral. I looked through food service records, emails between dining and students about the incident, and parental complaints about why they’re spending thousands of dollars on a required meal plan for bloody chicken and poor customer service.
Through all of this, I was just trying to get a full perspective on the situation, and portray that perspective to readers. The 6 hour reporting process led to a front-page story that eventually led to bigger media outlets picking up the story, and dining making a bunch of changes in staff and policy that semester. Change had happened.
But the entire time this was happening, what I was doing didn’t feel like work, because it was what I love to do. I love seeing a good story come together, and informing other people of what’s going on around them. That’s what I want out of an internship — the opportunity to see good stories come together, and learn what it takes to make that happen at a professional media outlet.
There’s a fire in me to do more in the journalism field, and I am beyond excited and determined to fuel that fire.
I want to learn from the top editors, the groundbreakers and the Pulitzer winners.
I want to see my writing get ripped to shreds so that in the end it can later on become great.
I want to grow, learn and gain invaluable experiences that teach me a thing or two about journalism.
And since I want all this, I must keep going.
Driven By Daydreams 