A month at The Carolina Alumni Review magazine

I have a paid internship at The Carolina Alumni Review magazine located on UNC's campus. I will begin from the beginning to present to explain how I got the internship and how it is thus far a month into it:

• Applying:
  

I am on every journalism job listserv for my UNC email imaginable at UNC. I have the Visual Comm. listserv specifically from my journalism sequence, I have the JOMC jobs from Jay Eubanks and I believe I am also on the career services listserv as well. (If you have yet to do such a thing, do it!! These listservs aid you in finding jobs SO well). I was looking for a paid summer internship for either journalism or history (my other major) and I happened to come across an internship for The Carolina Alumni Review (CAR) as a writer that was paid. Going back, I recently went to Jay Eubanks in the JOMC school for help on building up my resume and cover letter, and he gave me resume examples and offered to search for local internships for me. Back to the CAR internship ... I got my resume up, researched online which fonts, spacing, font sizes and placement of various information was appropriate and put it together. I sent writing examples from past journalism experiences where I was an intern in high school at my local paper back home called The State Port Pilot. I was also a University desk writer at The Daily Tar Heel, but I switched to the Multimedia desk of The DTH my junior year. So I sent about three pieces of writing that I considered good quality and my resume and waited.

• Interview:
  

I got an email back from one of the editors at CAR, David Brown, asking me to come into the next step, which was a face-to-face interview. Being a student and not having that much experience with interviews, I was quite nervous, but I got ready for the forms of questions they would ask me. I dressed up professionally for my interview, arrived at CAR 10 minutes early (that's a plus) and met David and the other editor, Keith. The interview took around 20 to 30 minutes and they asked me various questions involving past experience with my other internship as well as me being a multimedia journalist (audio/sound and photos). They asked questions like, "While working at The State Port Pilot, what did you take the most out of it?" and I would respond with answers like "I learned a lot about shaping my writing, working with other professional reporters, and always respecting the editor and expect my drafts to come back 'bleeding red.'" Near the end of the interview, I asked them about multimedia forms and told them that I could also contribute to that. One mistake I made but had no power over at the time was that after I turned in my resume to CAR, I made a website online in my JOMC 187 (multimedia) class and put a large portion of all of my journalism pieces on it. I told them I had a website but it was not on the resume. Even though I already sent in the resume, remember to ALWAYS UPDATE your resume. The website surprised them, in my opinion, and they wrote it down on my resume and checked it out. Here is my website.

• Call back and getting started:
  

Around two to three weeks after the interview, I'll never forget where I was, in my JOMC 187 (multimedia) class and got a phone call. I went down towards the doors because all Vis Comm students are in the basement of Carroll hall with all of the Mac computers. Keith called me and told me I got the internship and that they only chose two applicants. I was ecstatic! I just landed my first internship all by myself at a prestigious publication whose circulation reaches over 65,000 people! I started a few days after exams were over. I work 20 hours a week for $8/hour and keep my own hours on a time sheet. I get paid once a month. First day, I went through an hour's worth of orientation from David about how things were done, what I would be doing, met most of the other staff, etc. My second day, I was landed with two stories to write, one about 1.5.0. restaurant and the other about a professor and his experiment in UNC Public Health. I did my thing by interviewing, emailing, writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, editing and re-re-re-writing again. I was mostly pleased with myself.

• From May to mid-June:
  

Since writing my first two stories, I've come up with story ideas for them. One involving everything I love altogether - history, multimedia journalism, photographs, UNC - where I am in the middle of completing a huge multimedia project on every single class gift ever given to UNC where I would photograph / get video of it, find a story behind it if there is one and put them altogether in a photo slide and / or a Flash interactive. I also have written a couple other news blurbs and finished up on my original two articles. Things at CAR are very laid back since it is a bi-monthly magazine and I can even work at home. I am enjoying this internship because of the experience, connections and all other factors involved.