Internship, Work, Vacation, Repeat

"How was your summer?"   

The inevitable question we all hear so many times as a college student when arriving back to campus to start the new school year. When answering this question, you can go for the short but sweet, "relaxing". You may also respond with the classic, "I slept all summer," or "I worked all summer."

However, this year I did not have a short "go to" answer when asked how my summer went. Between my internship, my job, physical therapy, and vacations, I had a lot to talk about.

My first priority this summer was to find an internship. As an English major I am required to have 100 internship hours to graduate. For my journalism minor I need an additional 200 internship credit hours. Feeling stressed that I needed to take a good chunk out of the 300 credit hours this summer, I reached out to the news station I interned with the previous summer.

The summer of 2017 I interned with Bridge Street, a morning show at News Channel 9 ABC WSYR. This is the local news station in my hometown, Syracuse, NY. I reached out to them and received an internship with the news department this time. A week later I began my three-day-per-week internship, working with reporters and producers. It was an incredible internship and I received a lot of hands on experience. Every day I would go out on live stories with the reporters and camera men, then help create news packages with reporters. I would also work with producers to help format the nightly news shows.

One specific reporter I went out with more than the others. She became a mentor to me and helped me shoot my own stand-ups and footage to develop my own news packages. I learned a lot which has now carried over and helped me at my new internship.

My next task for the summer was to find a job because… well, broke college student obviously. After applying to a few restaurants in my town, I received a job as a server at Olive Garden. So for the rest of summer I smelled consistently of Olive Garden and their breadsticks (which were very hard to resist eating every day).

In addition to my internship and my job I still had to go to physical therapy for my knee. I had my second ACL repair surgery in one year about 6 months ago. So all summer I had to work on gaining mobility back and strengthening it.

However, despite all the work I still found time for vacation. I made trips to Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Long Island. But my favorite trip of the summer was my last trip, right before coming back for school, to Las Vegas.

I went for four nights and five days with eight of my best friends from home. We had the time of our lives and you know what they say, what happens in Vegas...