Why You Should Be Grateful For An Unpaid Internship

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the awesome opportunity that I had this summer with the local news channel in the greater Lansing area. If you did not get a chance to read my previous article, you can check it out here.

At the bottom of the article I wrote To Be Continued because I wanted to force myself to reflect upon my time at WLNS – Channel 6. I wanted to give myself a reason to write about what I learned, what I loved and what I hated so I would always remember this little sequence of my life. So below is the rest of my life’s short chapter that I spent at WLNS.

Continued…

In my article Why To Be Grateful For An Unpaid Internship, I talked about the amount of stress that can be put on interns because the eye is always on them. They are always being looked at in hopes of becoming the company’s next prodigy. They take your resume, look at your work ethic and start grooming you into what they hope will be the station’s next star on the weekly morning news shows. Sadly, most interns move on from local news, or in my case, completely rethink their whole major after partaking in their first internship. But hey, that’s what internships are for. Right?

When I found out that I got the internship, I wrote three questions down that I told myself to answer after my internship was completed. I feel as if answering these five questions gives readers more of an insight as to what the internship was like, rather than me just rambling on about the bests and worsts days at WLNS.

Are you able to say that you learned a great deal during the 14 weeks?

The news field is a field that is intense from the moment you walk in the door. Your mind must be in a continuous mode always looking for news. Whether it is something as small as a car crash or a bank robbery, I learned that you always have to be on your feet. I also learned how important a deadline is. In college if a student decides to not turn in a paper on time they either they either take a zero on the assignment or a small penalty per day that it is late. In the world of news, if you do not meet a deadline, you get fired. It is as simple as that. Luckily, I never had to see this up close.

Do you still want to go into journalism after seeing what the “real world” is like?

Writing has always been something I have enjoyed. Scratch that, writing has always been something that I have LOVED! I have always been the Queen of Fluff, meaning, I could literally answer one single question in a three page essay if I absolutely had to. I always knew that my career would revolve around writing and while I have been trying to make that career happen I have been jumping at different opportunities to be able to get myself to that career. I started writing for Odyssey this summer and I took this internship, which were both things I figured was necessary if I was going to declare my major as journalism. But what I have realized is the point of internships is to learn what you do and do not want to do with your life.

TV news is something I have learned is not what I want to do with the rest of my life, however, the amount of information I have learned and gained from the short fourteen weeks I was with WLNS is endless. The group of people I have worked with also could not have been better.

Would you recommend this internship to other journalism students?

Internships are hard. You have to show a passion for your work no matter what the work consist of. Answering phones, going out with reporters, or learning how to edit video with photographers – I promise it is not all that Ron Burgundy cracks it up to be. So, with that being said, if you plan on being the next Ron Burgundy or Veronica Coringstone then DO NOT pass up at an opportunity with your local TV news station. If you want to learn more about the journalism field because you are like me and do not necessarily know what direction you would like to head in the field, then GO FOR IT!

But… if you want to write, go write. Get an internship or job where you live, breath and eat, writing.