Part one of this series is here.

I had my very first internship when I was a junior in high school. My mom believed that before I got a paying job (and before I committed four years of my life and thousand of their dollars to a specific field) I should check it out and see if that’s what I wanted to do. Specifically, I wanted to get into TV news, so I interned at a local station. Starting that young (as a highschooler!) is a little unusual and not for every body, but it helped me see early on that being in an environment is much different (and often better!) than just learning about it.

After that, my first official TV job was born out of an internship. I interned at the same place during summer breaks all through college, and after my first couple years, I was able to take the exact same thing I did as an intern and for the next couple summers, get paid for it. Scattered between these summers, I took a lot of other intern possibilities. I dabbled in print, in cable access TV, in writing for advertisers, and in producing. When I graduated, my first official post-college job was at the same station where I’d been four summers before.

Internships will usually give you more real world knowledge of your field than you can get by just sitting in class. Sure, they draw on and back up that knowledge, but internships help you really understand and know by DOING! The other thing an internship gives you that you can’t get in a class is real-world contacts. Whether you’re aiming for a top spot at a top station one day, or are starting small, this world is all about who you know.

When I got this afore-mentioned job, I actually had already graduated college, and was living in Italy (another story for another day…). In spite of the fact that I was thousands of miles away, and wasn’t applying under conventional circumstances, my former (and future!) boss gave me the job after barely skimming through the interview and resume formalities. Bottom line here is, if a news director has the option to hire two fairly similarly qualified people, but one of them he doesn’t know, and the other he does (or comes highly recommended by someone close to him or her) who do you think is more likely to get the job?

*alexis (www.10thfloorpr.com)