Summer is coming to a close.

Aug 29, 2009 by Joshua    2 Comments    Posted under: daily life

In about a week, I start my fourth year of college. Over the past few months, rather than relaxing and being lazy, I have been working two jobs, one of which was an unpaid internship.

One of the requirements of my school is that I have to complete an internship before I graduate. Needless to say, I procrastinated when it came to applying for them, and I worried that I would not be able to get one in time. Luckily, I finally heard back in the affirmative from a local news company. I would be working – for credit – with a group that publishes a monthly parenting magazine as well as special inserts for weekly community newspapers.

In the weeks leading up to the internship, I was nervous. What if I did a bad job? What if they expected me to do things I didn’t know how to do? What could I possibly write about parenting, being a single young man with little experience around kids?

Looking back now, it seems my fears were unfound. I did what was expected of me, and for those tasks that I was unfamiliar with, I took them as a chance to learn. It wasn’t the most intense work environment – in fact, it was very laid back. Because of the length of time between each publication, I could take my time with an assignment, spending at least a week or two to get in-depth information from multiple sources.

And the staff I worked with was also great. I naturally take quite a bit of time to warm up to people, and I am typically very quiet until I get to know someone, so I spent much of the beginning of my internship quietly working away at my desk. As I opened up to the people around me – individuals who, on the surface, didn’t share any common characteristics with me, being mostly older women – I learned that we actually had a lot in common, and there were many topics to discuss.

For instance, two of the workers who specialized in designing and laying out ads, who sat on either side of me, are actually avid gamers. The woman in charge of the section is married to a professed geek who drags her along to all the best cons. If nothing else, I learned from my internship that people can be surprising, and one shouldn’t assume anything about them before getting to know them.

I’m not completely sure yet what sorts of lessons I learned about journalism. One thing I learned, however truthful it may be, is that the world of journalism doesn’t always involve curmudgeonly editors who bark at their staff, proverbially shaking a story draft in their clenched fist while puffing a chewed-up cigar at the corner of their lips. Of course, if I had worked at a daily newspaper that provides breaking news reports to the local area, I’m sure my internship experience would have been altogether different.

For the next week or so, I’m going on a family vacation before returning head-on into college life. I’m not sure if I’ll have an internet connection while I’m gone, so I can’t promise any updates. I might spend my free time queueing up a few on my computer, to publish on my return. I’m also not sure whether school life (and all its responsibilities) will provide me with more or less free time to update. Until then, enjoy whatever might be left of your Summer, and make the most of the nice weather while it’s still here.

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