Sunday, August 2, 2020
By:
After 9 weeks, I have finally published my first (and so far, only) article for FYI. To be honest, I’m very proud of myself. If someone had told me Freshman year, or even last summer that I’d be writing articles for a science policy publication and I’d really enjoy it, I’d have been pretty skeptical. Science is written in the language of math for a reason and the thought of having to write essays all day did not seem appealing to the young physicist within me. But writing for an English professor couldn’t be more different than writing for a news-focused science policy audience and I’m very glad it is. I’m pretty sure I’d have a very different opinion of my summer otherwise.
If you’re interested in reading it, you can find it here. I hope you enjoy.
With the summer coming to and end and the next week being my last, there are a few things I want to reflect on.
1) Internships are amazing opportunities
I’ve mentioned my experiences with AU’s internship culture before, but I also want to give a more personal story about my internship journeys. Last summer between sophomore and junior years my goal was to stay in DC for the summer. I applied to more than twenty positions and internships including SPS and got rejected from all of them. Maybe I was a bit young or just extremely unlucky, but it still hurt. Drafting personal statements, cover letters and resumes for each of those opportunities was hard and took time away from other things I could have been doing.
Still, that didn’t deter me. I continued to apply for opportunities through the fall and spring, and it paid off. So far, I’ve had two wonderful opportunities with NASA and now SPS, and I wouldn’t trade either of them for the world. What I think is so valuable about internships is the opportunity it gives you to think. College can be a bubble that doesn’t always prepare you for work in the real world. Internships are that bridge that let you understand if you actually enjoy the work that you’re doing, pointing you in the right direction in the long run.
So keep on applying. I know it’s hard, at times soul-crushing, but the only way forward is to keep moving. You’ll be rewarded for it in the end. Also apply to SPS because it is such an amazing program. I truly couldn’t have asked for anything more under the circumstances.
2) Editing never truly ends
There are currently 6 versions of my article sitting on my computer right now, and those are just versions that I wrote. There are at least another 5-6 that Mitch or Will sent back to me to review. And even after that entire process, there are still things in the article that I could see changing. As I—or should I say we—were nearing completion, Mitch told me that editing at FYI isn’t really like a normal news organization where something might be written by an author and then passed up the chain to an editor, instead we have a much more collaborative process where we end up with a consensus document. In each article, I can see the little pieces the team contributes and writing my own article from scratch has really made me appreciate that.
3) Time flies
My favorite song from one of my favorite bands is JR JR’s A Haunting off their second album. My favorite lyric from that song goes “I am so inundated by the speed of things.” I urge you listen, ponder an enjoy.
Cheers,
Hale Stolberg