By Jillian Rice, FCLC 2022
After a spreadsheet full of nearly 30 internship applications, most of which I got no response from, I was feeling dejected about finding a position in my dream field of editing. I’d been an editor on our school newspaper for three years, but apparently that line on my resume about my strong eye for detail wasn’t enough for publishing houses or other similar publications to think I was right for the job.
Then came an email from Busted Halo, the media company owned by the Paulist Fathers at St. Paul’s next door. Would I like a Zoom interview? I sat down at my desk under my loft bed in between studying for my Greek final which I had later that day, and long story short, I got the job. I began working remotely for them in June 2021, and I’ve continued (still remote) through the fall semester. My life plan is to be an editor — somewhere, somehow — and as a Catholic Studies concentrator, this was pretty perfect.
We interns do a variety of things for the company, from posting on the website to answering Instagram DMs, and I even spent a lot of time adding captions to YouTube videos. I went into it expecting to learn more about editing in the real world (and I have; no question about it), but I’ve picked up so many more skills along the way.
Since we’re a small team, I’m never simply editing, though the editors do play to interns’ strengths (and they don’t give me graphic illustration work to do all the time!). I’ve written more tweets than I thought one human could write (but I am now very familiar with TweetDeck) and even been a guest on a radio show!
As Esme said on one of her posts, coming into a place and creating graphics for them isn’t just making pretty pictures. They have a brand (or in our case, a set of colors on Canva), and anything you make has to be visually appealing and not too busy. As someone with very little graphic design knowledge besides what I’ve picked up by osmosis on the newspaper, even seeing that a graphic I made is getting posted on Instagram is still a thrill.
Working at my internship is just like being at Fordham, since two of my three bosses graduated from Rose Hill, and both my fellow interns over the summer were Fordham students, too. It seems that a lot of media publications in New York like hiring Fordham students, which bodes well for us newspaper kids as we graduate!
At Busted Halo, when the news came out that Fr. McShane was retiring, we had a little gossip session as to whom we thought the next president might be. A few weeks later, we were sharing Fordham parody videos that different comedy groups created while we were each at Fordham. It’s conversations like these that make me a bit less terrified to graduate and leave the world of schooling.
This internship has given me very marketable skills like social media writing and engagement, and working with experienced professionals has helped me understand and hone my (already plentiful!) love for grammar even more. I’ve also learned that trying to juggle an internship, many hours a week at the campus newspaper, five classes, and time to relax or sleep isn’t easy — my advice to anyone reading this: please be honest with yourself about how much you can handle in a semester, and remember to give yourself time to enjoy Fordham and New York (our campus, after all) on top of your other duties.