I've had two interviews for summer internships this break. One for a big name newspaper in New York and the other for a smaller, no-name magazine in New Jersey. It's a shame because I truly think I could learn invaluable information from the magazine in NJ and I would get to see the production of a magazine from start to finish. The editor also said I would get a bylined feature story and I would be majorly involved with their new blog and would assist in some market research. However, I feel like if I get the internship in NY I have to take it just because of the name. Hopefully I would still get good experience there too, but I feel like a lot of the time I would be running around getting coffee. The NY one is paid though, and the NJ one is just for school credit.
That is another reason why being a journalism major is so frustrating sometimes. I would be totally willing to sacrifice one summer for an unpaid internship (we are required to have one for school credit, anyways) if I knew that it would lead to a possible paid internship the next summer and hopefully a job after graduation. But instead, many students like myself, are forced to take multiple summers of unpaid internships all to graduate and get a job that pays what...$25,000 a year?!
I know that so many professions are in transition right now and we journalism majors definitely aren't the only ones worrying, but the whole field is so up in the air. Will newspapers and magazines even exist in five years or will everything be online? I guess I can only watch and see and work hard in the meantime.
And with that,
GO TERPS!
