Internship

 

            I did my internship senior year. My mother knew the editor of the Alameda Sun Eric Kos, a local newspaper of my home city Alameda, and helped to get me in contact with him about writing articles. My major in college is going to be Creative Writing; so although journalism isn’t anywhere near the same, it still involves skills that I’m going to need to further my career as a writer. I made an appointment to go into the Alameda Sun’s office, located on the corner of Encinal and High street, and met with Eric on a Friday morning when we didn’t have school. I wrote several articles for him and each of them took a large chunk of time.

            One of the articles I wrote was on the Canvas Peace Project, an idea created by the HOPE for Ariang Foundation to raise money to support educational opportunities for women and children in South Sudan. The Canvas Peace Project had a gallery of art set up at Rhythmix Cultural Works, which is a community based association built to bring together people of all ages. The art included pieces from all sorts of mediums, such as oil paints, acrylic, statues made of clay, photographs, pencil sketches, watercolors, and both flat and three dimensional glass pieces. I covered the purpose of the gallery, which was to raise money for charity for people in South Sudan through an art auction, and also some of the back story on the Canvas Peace Project itself.

            As I mentioned earlier, journalism isn’t exactly what I want to go into in college or as a career. But plenty of the writing skills needed to write a novel are also used in all sorts of other kinds of writing; such as grammar, paragraph placement, sentence flow, and others. Through writing journal articles for the Alameda Sun I got to practice many of the writing skills that I am going to need to improve upon throughout all four of my college years. Primarily I’m interested in writing fiction novels, most likely in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. Especially in writing that involves vivid descriptions of characters, settings, and scenes, grammar and sentence structure is widely important to be able to convey what the author is seeing in their head onto paper that the reading audience can then read and see in their own heads.

            Something I had trouble with during the internship process was time. I struggle greatly in school because of my mental health. It’s already hard for me to balance my normal homework load with any kind of social life and cool down time for myself. And my insomnia certainly doesn’t help, when I don’t sleep I get stressed and when I’m stressed I can’t sleep. I found myself racing from place to place to get some of the information I needed to write these articles. And I tried very hard to not fall behind on my regular homework when I had an article to write.

            But all in all I had a great experience. Writing for a journalism instead of creative writing was an interesting change, and I feel that I have more of the knowledge that I am going to need to get through college.