Allyson Bird - Internship Diary

Final Entry:

And it's over like that:

I glimpsed the unicorn. At age 20, I had the rare opportunity to do what professional journalists spend years working toward: I got to work in a Washington new bureau for the national press during an election season.

For the past semester, I haven't done homework or taken an exam. I've put on a business suit and gone to an office every day. It'll be strange sitting in class again, wearing jeans during the workweek, skipping if I feel the need. Strange and wonderful.

While in Washington, I kept catching myself telling people I 'went' to USC, forgetting that I'm 20, that I'll come home to another year of school and hearing lectures on the Washington press corps in politics and journalism classes.

The work here was a roller coaster ride. Some days I'd find myself searching for more hours, and other days I felt sure I'd surfed the entire Internet looking for a new story. I became convinced journalism is conducive to bipolar disorder. One day, you're getting great interviews, excitedly filing copy ahead of deadline. The next day, you're waiting around for returned calls or unsuccessfully staking out a source, thinking you're an incompetent reporter and only working by a stroke of pure luck. I suppose that's where the journalist experiences the agonies of any artist. And develops a predilection for heavy drinking and the tendency to say 'cheers' in closing any e-mail.

This semester was the first time I've really been on my own, and it was sweet independence. But I found out how difficult living visit-to-visit can make a long-distance relationship. And I missed driving. Over the summer I'd take the James Island connector into downtown Charleston on pink-skied harbor mornings to work at The Post and Courier. Here, I'd take a cool stroll to the Metro and then hop into one of those squeaky giant gray earthworms sliding through a concrete underground Washington.

I'll return to USC with mixed feelings. I'm relieved to have more time as a college student, to know that this semester was a practice and that the rest of my life isn't going to start running on an office schedule yet. But I'll miss the insider's view of our government. I'll return to reading about the three branches as an abstraction and not my everyday surroundings. I won't see all the country's top newspapers every morning, and I won't keep an eye on the legislative and presidential schedules in the Associated Press daybook.

My bureau was fabulous. Never have I been so scrupulously edited, and never have I been pushed so hard to write better. I didn't expect to find such a friendly and comfortable work environment where I would get to write real copy. I had expected to fetch coffee and staple papers.

As this semester closes, I'm only further convinced I want to pursue a career in journalism. Now that I've tasted Washington, I have an appreciation for the candor and accessibility of the everyday people I used as sources before coming here. Everything here is a little over-reported, but the energy is unique. I have to keep reminding myself that most of the country doesn't care about every triviality the Washington press corps might jump to. But I did enjoy jumping these past few months.

Though this semester has gone by faster than any other and was even more than I anticipated, I'm looking forward to using Capstone House instead of the Capitol building as my guiding light back home. To packing away the antibacterial hand gel - not because people in South Carolina aren't dirty, but because there are fewer of them. And to being a jeans-wearing college kid for another year. Cheers to that.