Job Shadows: What You Saw, Part 2

Here's a sampling of some of the various job shadows done by you all (this will be updated as job shadow reports are turned in, so please check back frequently). Take a look and see what you can learn from everyone's visits. There's a lot of good stuff here to help you decide what you want to do with your lives; what you need to be doing to get there; and what to expect when you do get there.

Please give each one of these a quick read as they come in, will you?

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For my job shadow, I went to MSU Board of Trustees meeting at 9:30 a.m. October 30^th in the Hannah Administration Building with RJ Wolcott, a reporter with the Lansing State Journal. The meeting lasted about 2 hours. The school administrators talked about many events in the school, such as a science project for students, and funding.

            When I arrived at the Hannah Administration building, RJ led me to the meeting room. In the meeting room, there are special seats for all the journalists. There are two huge cameras behind the meeting room. To be honest, this meeting for me was really tedious, because the school’s administrators used some terminology to introduce their program for school. RJ told me that it is really difficult sometimes to understand what people are talking about if you do not know the terminology they are using, so we need to prepare for what they might say beforehand. Moreover, RJ told me the materials that you get from an interview could also be used for future stories, so he stories notes all the time. 

RJ told me this was not a really long meeting. He said he had experience of having a three-hour meeting at MSU. In this meeting, different administrators talked about parking lots, a science project, a lab program and MSU’s funding of repairs to the Breslin Center. RJ took a lot of notes for the funding. He told me that school puts in millions of dollars for this so it is what we need to pay more attention to. RJ said you should focus more on the most important news. Sometimes not every story is really important even though they are interesting, like the science project in this meeting.

At the end of the meeting, all journalists were interviewing different people. RJ interviewed two people among about 50 people because those were the most helpful to his story. They included MSU President Lou Anna Simon. RJ said when you know who is the most vital person to your story, you should try your best to talk with that person.

After the meeting, RJ took me to the MSU library where he always writes story as a journalist, because he thinks the school library is not as noisy as his office. After he finished his story for the meeting, he showed me how he published the story and how to put pictures in the story and how to perfect the story before he published it.

Then I interviewed RJ for some general questions. RJ told me he works as an education reporter because he thinks education is important and fundamental for every person, and he has passion about it. RJ told me being a journalist is not easy work; that I need to talk to people more often, even though it might be a little bit hard initially to talk to people. But practicing many times will make you be more comfortable to talk to people. Moreover, RJ told me we should find the topic we think is interesting for us. 

I asked RJ what should I do in college to be a good journalist in the future. He told me we should learn many skills that others might not have. He said that when we have something different from others, our opportunities of getting a job would increase. For example, if we know how to take a good photo, know how to use Photoshop, how to write articles and make a video, we will have more advantages than people who just know how to write.

RJ reminded me that we need to have an internship between sophomore and junior years because if we start as a senior, that is too late.

Sometimes I think interviews are really hard for me because the language barrier. But RJ told me I need to practice more so the language barrier will not be a challenge. But the most important thing is that when we talk to others, we need to be kind to make others comfortable, and start with easy questions. Before we have the interview, we can search for information about the person you want to talk with.

In this meeting, there was so much information I think was equally important. So I asked RJ how did he determine the news value? RJ told me we should find out what most people want to read about. What is the most interesting news for the audience? That is really important to determine what should we write in the news.

It is a really awesome experience for me. This is my first time to know how journalism works, how to prepare good journalism, and what should we do to prepare be a journalist.