BLANCHARD: “Where and when did you do your internship?”

WISEN: “I did a copy editor internship at The Holland Sentinel during the spring 2009 semester.” BLANCHARD: “What kinds of duties did you have?”

WISEN: “I did page layout for a variety of pages – feature pages, ‘haps’ pages, obituary pages, sports pages, wire pages, weather pages, local news pages, fronts of sections. I copy edited stories and conducted final edits on page proofs. I selected, downloaded and edited AP photos and clip art for stories. I edited, uploaded and posted web stories. I also took photos — very rarely, but it happened.”

BLANCHARD: “How many hours do you work a week, how many days a week? Starting, quitting times?”

WISEN: “I worked 10 hours a week, two days a week. On Sundays, I worked from 4 to 9 p.m. On Wednesdays, I worked from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.”

BLANCHARD: “Was there a dress code? If so, what was it?”

WISEN: “There was an implied dress code — I never had a situation where I sat down with my boss and talked about what to wear, but I was in a professional place so I dressed professional. Black pants, khakis… If I wore jeans, they were “nice” jeans. When I worked the late shift on Sundays, things were more casual.”

BLANCHARD: “Talk about the deadlines under which you operated.”

WISEN: “I wasn’t at work when the paper hit deadline and the two times I worked during the week had very different deadlines. On Wednesdays, I worked on Life&Style pages and therefore I worked on pages that were going in the next day’s paper, that Saturday’s paper or in a paper the following week — that makes deadlines interested. My deadlines these days were dictated different than a normal deadline would be. However, I know that, on Wednesdays, the faster I got done, the more exposure to different types of pages I would have. So, if I didn’t get AT LEAST four pages done in the five hours I was there, then I wasn’t making my personal deadline. Sunday shifts were different. If I didn’t have my stuff done by the time that I left, it fell on the other people I worked for because all my pages were Monday paper pages. In reality, a big thing about deadlines were my own personal deadlines. In a class with journalism instructor Ann Byle, she said that she would have about one and a half hours to finish a page when she worked at The Press. I made sure that my deadline for each page was either that or one hour because I wanted to be working at a professional pace. By doing this, I gained a lot of respect from both my immediate boss, Krista Babbitt, and the head editor, Pamela Fisher.”

BLANCHARD: “Did anything intimidate you on your first day or first week on the internship job?”

WISEN: “My first day was a nightmare. I wasn’t feeling great going into the work day, and then, about one hour after I started working, I began throwing up. A lot. Turns out I had the flu that it seems everyone had this winter — I just got lucky and had it on my first day of work. After that, I wasn’t intimidated — it worked as a nice ice breaker. All my coworkers thought it was hilarious.”

BLANCHARD: “How do you think your internship affected you?”

WISEN: “It taught me a lot of things but one thing that stands out to me is the value of personal deadlines and hard work. My job was to get the stories on the paper, make it eye-catching and make the copy flawless so that my coworkers/boss didn’t have to redo my work. If my page proofs came back looking like a mess, then that’s a poor reflection of my skills. Therefore, I had to work quickly and still be accurate – something you don’t have to learn when you’re working on a weekly that has multiple fact checks.”

BLANCHARD: “Did anything about working at Holland Sentinel surprise you?”

WISEN: “Two main things —

1. The need to be flexible. When I was there, multiple people were laid off. If you want to keep a job in the newspaper business, you have to make yourself valuable to the paper. If you are flexible, then you are valuable. For example, sports writers would get cut — but not the sports writers who could also take photos and do page layout. I knew about that before, but I didn’t realize how important it was.

2. The importance of keeping your testimony. Within the first couple weeks, I learned that everyone talked about everyone with everybody and 99.9 percent of the conversation is negative. However, what surprised me most was when Pam Fisher told me who the Christians in the office were. This was surprising because they were the ones who were gossiping the most. So, how is the Christian going to be able to witness to their Buddhist coworker when that coworker just watched the Christian throw someone under the bus? I actually had a chance to witness to someone while at work the other day and he said the whole Christian thing is hard for them because he doesn’t see a huge difference among people of different religions in the workplace. That was really hard for me.”

BLANCHARD: “What did you enjoy most about your internship?”

WISEN: “Although I really loved the challenge of beating my deadlines and completing more work than my boss thought I could, the best part about my internship had to be the relationships with my coworkers. They’ve been in the business long enough where they could really teach me about how to do things better and how to career plan better. But hearing their stories and finding what made them tick – that’s what really made it for me.”

BLANCHARD: “What advice would you give other CU students interested in finding an internship?”

WISEN: “Two pieces of advice for while you’re an intern:

1. WORK LIKE A DOG — Work hard and work fast. Don’t be lazy. The best advice I ever got about interning was that your goal as an intern is to be constantly asking “What else can I do?” My favorite working moments during this internship came when my boss looked at me and said, “Wow… you’ve done it all. There’s really nothing else left I could give you to do today.” If you work like a dog, you’ll impress your boss. If you impress your boss, you’ll be able to get a good recommendation from them when you need it for another position.

2. Be flexible and get in classes that teach you everything. One of the things I got congratulated the most on during my internship was a photo I took for one of the community pages. Why? Because I’m a paginator — what the heck am I doing taking photos? Well, one day Pam wanted a photo of something she saw out the window. The photographer was out and none of the reporters knew how to take good pictures. However, I was in a photojournalism class and had my camera in the car. So, one minute I’m sitting at my desk doing page layout and the next I am climbing, jumping and crawling across roofs and beams to get some shot for a community page. Not only was it a blast, but it made me stand out. Because I was flexible, I made myself more valuable to the paper and therefore got better reviews from my boss.”

Alan Blanchard, associate professor, is director of CU’s Journalism Dept. — www.cornerstone.edu/journalism