My First Internship

 

I did two internships during my time at BYU, and the first was an unpaid summer internship for my hometown newspaper, The Dalles Chronicle.

I grew up reading the Chronicle, and it shaped my idea of local journalism before I headed off to college. I had also been featured in the Chronicle a few times in high school – once, I was quoted as a student representative on a committee advising the school board; another time, I appeared in a front page photo as Cinderella’s stepmother in the spring musical. So getting my byline in that particular paper was satisfying.

Everyone at the Chronicle was significantly older than me, but the two full-time general assignment reporters, both near retirement age, were gracious in taking me under their wing. The sum total of my journalism experience thus far was a single semester at a student publication, but once I proved my worth my editor trusted me to go off and report on all sorts of stories.

I filled in for the sports reporter while he went on vacation, and while there were no high school games to cover, I filled the sports page for the week with features on off-beat “sports” like dirt biking and fly fishing. I covered various local summer events, and wrote a column defending my decision to go into journalism even though people kept telling me print was dead. One of my favorite stories I did that summer was a long Sunday feature on a tattoo artist, talking about her journey to sobriety from drugs.

During my internship I confronted one of the weaknesses that many journalists of my generation face: I really hated talking on the phone. The idea of picking up the phone and cold-calling a stranger was about as daunting as walking into an interview in my underwear.

At the Daily Universe, I had almost always been able to avoid this by using the university directory to email professors to set up an interview and then interviewing them in person. But in the real world in 2009, most businesses didn’t have a website listing all their staff email addresses, Facebook was for college students, and texting was for people who could afford to pay 10 cents a text.

I don’t know if it was more a Millennial thing or a McDowell thing. My mom and my aunt once bonded over laughing hysterically at stories of the lengths their husbands went to avoid picking up a phone. Why call the number in the window of the car you are really interested in buying, when you can just drive by it every day in the hopes that the owner will be standing there?

Either way, I had to really psyche myself up every time I made a phone call. I would literally write down a script for introducing myself and study it, rehearsing the words in my head, taking a few deep breaths and then saying to myself, “Actually, maybe I’ll do this other thing and call later.” Every time I got an answering machine, I breathed a sigh of relief.

They weren’t even hard calls, unlike later in my career, when I would have to call people to ask questions like, “Did you commit this crime you’re accused of?” or “Why did you get fired?” You would think people would yell at you or hang up on you when you told them you were going to write in the paper that they were being charged with a crime, but surprisingly, those conversations were sometimes downright pleasant. A man accused of defrauding people by collecting “investments” in creation of a biofuels plant and then allegedly spending all that money on himself, for example, cheerfully told me he would be happy to invite me to the groundbreaking when it was ready to take place.

On the other hand, sometimes the most innocuous-seeming stories you didn’t think twice about will get you yelled at. I once covered a 5k event on Thanksgiving, for example, and when I arrived I asked who was in charge and interviewed the woman who was pointed out, referring to her as “Organizer so-and-so” in the story that also featured quotes from several runners and information about the charity the event was benefitting. Later a different woman called, irate, and asked how I could be so incompetent to give someone else credit for the event that she organized. No “thank you for missing out on family time to work Thanksgiving Day to give some positive coverage of our event,” just complaints.

Anyway, I took the first step in getting over my phone phobia with my internship at the Chronicle, and survived. I couldn’t afford to spend the entire summer there, because college is expensive, but I did spend eight weeks of my four-month summer break there and then spent the next couple of months working 60-hour weeks to make up for it.

I had assumed I would be heading into my first paid journalism job in the fall, after faculty at the Daily Universe told me I did a great job as a reporter there and I should apply for a paid editor position when I came back. However, they ended up deciding to hire students who were closer to graduation and hadn’t had the opportunity for that experience yet.

This resulted in the only period of unemployment in my adult life. It was in 2009, when the recession was still going strong, and there was more supply than demand when it came to student labor. Everywhere I went that fall semester, I’d hand over my job application only to see it placed on an inch-thick stack of applications already submitted. I’d like to say that I used that extra 20 hours a week wisely, but to be honest, my grades weren’t any better, I just spent more time socializing and actually had time to watch TV for once.

I applied for the Daily Universe again as the fall semester came to a close, and at first I was once again told that there were seniors who needed the experience more than I did. But over Christmas break, I caught a lucky break: One of the girls hired had changed her mind about working there, and I was asked to take her place.

I was ready.