My Summer Job

Well I had a great summer job after all. I got an internship just like I wanted. I have a first cousin once removed in-law who works at the university advancement office at San Jose State University, where I go to grad school. They are the PR office for the university and put out the alumni magazine as well as all the pamphlets related to the school that are used in recruitment. The also deal with all the media and act as the spokesperson for the university.

So I visited my cousin there one day and she showed me around and it happened to come up that they had no intern lined up for the summer because the couldn't get a grant for that time. Well, I was really interested in being exposed to the world of journalism so I said I could volunteer my time if they needed someone. The did and I started right away.

I had so much fun. Everyone was so nice. They truly tried to give me interesting work, not just typing and copying, though of course as an intern I did that too. And even that was interesting because I got to see the types of documents that flow through a PR office, like updated guidelines for professors in relating to the media.

One thing that I didn't know was about clip logging. There are services that read every paper in the state (and contract with services in other states that do the same) and they cut out articles that mention SJSU. They then attach a little tag to the "clip" that says which paper it came from and the date it appeared and then they send them to us in big, bulging envelopes. I would go through all of them and enter the headline, date, person/department mentioned and their relation to the university (professor, alum etc.) into a spreadsheet. It was a little tedious but I enjoying seeing all the different ways that SJSU came up in the news. Mostly it was professor quotes, especially these two political science professors, but sometimes it would be some random alum in North Carolina that won an award so their bio showed up in the paper. Random stuff like that. Anyway, it was fun.

August 4th I will be out of town, so I won't write that day. But here I am early! I'll try to be early next time too.