Monday, August 16, 2010

Last week and new horizons

It's my last week with the AP.

This summer has gone by amazingly fast. Now, to be fair, my internship is ending a week ahead of schedule. For those of you that haven't heard, I was offered my first job out of college.

No, not with the AP.

This job has almost been two years in the making. A couple of years ago I interned with the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon as part of the Chips Quinn Scholars program. It was a great summer.

The executive editor told me on my last day to keep in touch because he wanted me to come back eventually. I didn't realize at the time that that someday would coincide perfectly with my graduation.

After keeping him posted over the years and letting him know where I was going in the summers for internships, December came around and again, I let him know I would finally be graduating in the summer.

This time, I wouldn't have to worry about having to go back to school after my internship. This time, all I had to worry about was landing a job in a newsroom.

This isn't as easy as it seems these days. I'll admit that I was getting a little stressed out about it earlier in the year. Some people say to start looking before you graduate and before the end of your internships because it takes a long time, sometimes several months.

But in February, after e-mailing resumes, cover letters and clips to several job postings from the journalism job listing websites to no avail, I stopped. I decided that the stress was too much and that I needed to just focus on getting through the semester and the internship I had lined up for the summer.

So I did, I stopped the job search and focused on what I was doing at the time. It felt right.

Although I cheated periodically and sent out a couple stray packets to see what would happen. Nothing but rejection letters and a lot of "we have decided to look at other candidates at this time."

So there it was.

But there was hope on the horizon with my back-and-forth e-mails with Bill Church. Since December we had e-mails going about the possibility of something opening up soon. I sent recent clips, an updated resume, you name it.

It paid off.

On the same day all of the AP interns (about 25 of us) got the "we will probably only hire a few of you" speech, I got the e-mail from Bill that they wanted to do a phone interview.

I was really excited to talk with the three editors I got to know that summer in Oregon. It went really well and after a couple of weeks of waiting _ somewhat stressful weeks _ I got the offer.

I have since signed the offer and am making my plans to move to the Pacific Northwest, hence the premature ending of my internship.

But it has been a great summer with this news organization.

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