Last week we had orientation...all week. It was a lot to take in, but it was nice to have a little time to get adjusted before we just jumped into everything. For those of you who don't know much about what I'm doing down here, I'll explain.
The program that I'm doing is called the Boston University Washington Journalism Program. The program consists is, in total, 16 credit hours. Four of those are the one class that I will take entitled, "Political Reporting," which doesn't leave much to the imagination.
Another four credits are for an internship. My internship is with the Washington Bureau of Cox Newspaper Company. Cox owns several papers throughout the country, most notably the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American - Statesmen, and the Palm Beach Daily News. My internship supervisor, is the photo editor, Rick McKay. As it turns out, Rick is also the entire photo staff, so now it's Rick and his intern, me. This is actually great for me because it means that I can shoot any assignment I want. As Rick said, "I've been here 24 years, I've shot it all. It's Washington, everything's an annual event." (That's me at my huge cubicle. I know you can't see if, but I even have a little TV to watch CNN on!)
The remaining eight credits are for "Newsroom." The students who participate in the Washington Journalism Program are essentially working for the Boston University Washington News Service. It's hard to explain but basically, all of the print journalism students are paired with a New England newspaper and become their "Washington Corespondent." They write stories about things that are going on in DC that relate to the newspaper's district. My job in all of this, is to shoot for all of these papers. Anytime there are photos that could go with one of the student's stories, it's my job as the sole photographer to go out and shoot it. It'll be a lot of work, but it means that my photos could in appear in papers ranging from the Keene Sentinel to the Norwalk Hour.
So that's what I'll be doing down here. I guess I'm not too terribly surprised that we needed a whole week of orientation to get that all straightened out. Along with telling us all we needed to know, we also got to see some of DC from the top of a double decker bus during a DC bus tour, met with alumni of the program and got an insiders tour of the Capitol. Which leads me to the most exciting part of orientation... CAPITOL PRESS CREDENTIALS!!! I am now free to, basically, go anywhere in the Capitol that I'd like. It's kinda a power trip. =) I've also got IDs for my internship, but they're not nearly as interesting. I finally feel like I fit in around DC cause I've got like 4 IDs hanging around my neck at all times.
Tomorrow is my first day of Newsroom so I'll have to update you on how that goes another time, but I'm assuming things are gonna be pretty slow this first week. Congress will only be here till the end of September and then things will be really dead because of the election. We're all a little worried about that, but we're hoping that there will still be some interesting things going on in town.
So now that you're all super excited about what I'm doing. Let me show you where I'm living! The housing is in the same building as my classrooms at 2807 Connecticut Ave, NW. It's a BU owned building, of course, that has apartments on the top floors and classrooms, and our newsroom, below. Each apartments has three double bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen/common area. I lucked out and managed to get a double bedroom all to myself. I have four lovely roommates, two from BU and two from Butler. So here are some shots of my room, I'm sure it'll look familiar to a few of you, seeing as it has all the same stuff my BU room had in it.
There's probably more that I could tell you, but at the moment that seems like enough information for one day. Oh, yes today was day one of my internship. Nothing too exciting, just got my IDs and hung out. We watched the Palin/Clinton sketch from SNL about a million times, went out to lunch, and then we went home, around 2pm. Now if only I was getting paid for this...lol.
Tonight's our first political reporting class so I've gotta run a few errands before then. Hope everyone is doing well! - SBY
No comments:
Post a Comment