The following post was excerpted from an e-mail I wrote earlier this afternoon. I don’t know whether or not it makes an e-mail less personal if you later publish it for others to see. 🙂 In any case, I wrote it for a specific friend but thought it was worth repeating. He doesn’t read this site, anyway, so he’ll never know. 😀
So, I had told Alisa a couple hours ago that I thought I should hear something from an internship today in exchange for not getting the weekend I had planned. (Yes, I’m a baby, but I thought that was a fair request of God. 😉 ) Well, I got what I prayed for – I opened the mailbox and found a letter from the Raleigh News & Observer, among other items.
I pulled that out, along with a package for Alisa and another for me, and headed back up to the apartment. I opened the package first. I saved the envelope from the Raleigh paper for last, even though I knew what it contained. I told you the other night that I feel like I’m applying for college all over again. Well, college acceptance letters always felt different than rejections – thicker, usually. All this envelope contained was a single sheet of paper, so I knew I didn’t get the internship before I opened it.
Sure enough, the three sentences typed on the company’s letterhead were not encouraging:
“Thank you for your interest in our 2004 summer internship program. We had more than 140 applications and I regret to tell you were not chosen. I wish you well as you begin your journalism career.”
Man. That stinks. Raleigh is one of the smaller (though not smallest) papers I’ve applied to thus far. If I can’t get accepted there, I might as well cross Jacksonville, Charlotte, New Orleans, Richmond and Austin off the list. That leaves Louisville and Quincy, Mass., out of the applications I’ve already mailed. When I was at that party for my program last weekend, one of the older grad students all but told me that I wouldn’t get accepted to any of the places I’d applied. I was pretty discouraged when I left that night, but I hoped she was wrong. Guess not.
The good news is that the Birmingham magazine internship is promising. I don’t know if you remember me telling you about it, but it’s the one that I would start in February and work at 15 hours per week while I’m taking classes this semester. Because it’s a part time internship, and unpaid at that, I feel like my chances are much stronger. Still, the pressure’s on.
If I can get that internship, and receive confirmation that I’ve been accepted to it, before I send out my last few apps, that would be excellent. I think that having that experience would boost my chances for the places I have yet to apply (Southern Progress, Cape Cod, Anniston, maybe Daytona Beach). I really want to get a newspaper internship this summer (or Southern Progress!), and I’m increasingly nervous about it. If I can’t even get an internship, how on earth am I going to get a JOB?!?!?!?
But worse comes to worse, I can apply for the Birmingham magazine internship for the summer, too. It’s not nearly as good as having a 40 hour week experience, but it’s a heckuva lot better than just writing for the school paper. And if I stayed here this summer, I might be able to graduate by August. Maybe.