Rachel Southmayd Interning at The Cape Cod Times in Hyannis, Mass. Class of 2013 - incoming Election 2012 reporter

I am not a stranger to the world of internnships. For every summer of my college career, one Winter Term and one semester abroad, I've had the term "intern" attached to my name. This summer, I'm working in the Features Department of The Cape Cod Times in Hyannis, MA, a 40,000 daily circulation paper that also has a few magazine inserts each week. Full disclosure, it is paid, and that's one of the reasons I applied for this position. Know why? Because of this.

That's a fact sheet from the US Department of Labor, and this little document is one of the keys (in my humble opinion) to finding yourself a paid internship that really means something, especially during the summer months: find an internship where you're actually doing valuable work, because that should mean there's a paycheck associated with it. I'm not saying that packaging fashion samples or fetching coffee isn't work, because it is, but I'm not a big believer in that sort of "paying your dues" if you want to be a writer or an editor or a designer. Again, in my opinion, "paying your dues" should include things like covering a story about a 10,000 pound whale carcass that washed up on the beach (done it) or designing News page 5 every night for a month.

In the case of The Cape Cod Times, the community it serves is very summer-vacation oriented, so the amount they need covered during the summer months shoots way up. So, to fill the gap, they hire a whole team of interns to supplement every section so the regular staffers don't have to work themselves to the bone. But it seems to be their goal to get us to the coolest stuff they possibly can (case in point, the first week I was here, I got to go to the Nantucket Film Festival and a comedy roundtable with Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey, Chris Rock and Bill Hader). They also host weekly workshops on topics we, the interns, would like to learn more about, becaue they want this to be as positive and meaningful an experience as possible.

I've been spoiled, probably, in my position, but I don't know that it's a bad thing. I love my internship and usually just refer to it as my job, because that's what it feels like to me. I'm doing real work and getting real experience, and that's what I think everyone should strive for when they're on their own internship hunt.

[box]  Want to share a reflection from your summer internship? Email a post and photo to Pendulum@elon.edu and we’ll add you to our blog! [/box]