My Summer Internship

Pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication put forward students like me to grab internship opportunities. As a part of our curriculum I was supposed to do an internship after my forth semester with any media industry. After trying a lot and applying for good ones, I finally landed up an internship with “Lokmat Times”, a very famous English printed publication. It is issued daily and is circulated in Nagpur, Nashik and Aurangabad.

I was very keen on interning with a publication house because of my natural inclination towards writing. I was hoping that I would gain some valuable perspective about reporting and editing, and other aspects involved in print journalism. The internship span was of 30 days., and those 30 days were life changing and gave a whole new world to me that I never expected.

The first day of the internship was really exciting and scary for me at the same time. Till now I just read about journalism and newspapers and the fact that I will have to work for it now was really stressful.Luckily, I was able to hide my anxiety about the situation and made a good first impression on my co-workers.

I was assigned under Ankita Deshkar ma’am, my internship coordinator. She walked me through the process and gave me a heads up as to what I can come across over next 30 days. On first day they assigned me to write news articles from press notes/ releases. By the end of the day, I wrote 4 news articles and 2 of them actually got published in the next day’s issue.

Shreyash Holay, head of the city supplement, used to give me translation work. I was expected to translate Hindi and Marathi news pieces into English for the Lokmat Times. He also made sure I know how to use the QuarkXPress, the software that the whole office used to work on, how to design a page and what are the elements and components that needs to be given major attention to.

As the days passed by I was having fun at work and was learning a lot from all my co-workers. I came to know how print production actually works. The news collection process, editing and finally publishing it was a long and tedious process. The only thing that I couldn’t do as an intern for which I was looking forward to, was going to news conference and getting news first hand all by myself. They didn’t allow the interns to do that but rest of the office culture was lovely and interesting.

It ended sooner than I expected but the knowledge that I have received from that experience and the skills that I have brushed up was much needed. Engaging myself into an internship was a great and fruitful utilization of my summer break. It couldn’t have been better.