Press “Repeat” for Excellent KALW Summer Internship Experience

By Guest Blogger Jeannie Doan, KALW Summer Intern

The KALW internship is one of the best things I signed up for during the summer. This was my first internship, so I was really nervous about working with other adults.

However, the staff is nice, caring, and outgoing, and I was able to make friends with a lot of them. When they ask me personal questions, I feel very comfortable talking about myself. And every day that I come in, they want to know how I was doing. The place just feels like home–you can totally relax while doing your work. On some days, we even celebrated birthdays, which were really nice and a bit unexpected. It’s a place where I could really be myself.

In addition to the great environment, the internship allowed me to polish and develop a lot of skills. I learned how to capture clear sounds with very little background noise and how to interview another person properly.

There’s also a lot of hands-on activities. For an example, I helped engineer one of the other intern’s mix tapes, meaning that I was able to operate on the sound board, which was pretty neat. I got to work with Pro Tools, which is a sound editing program, to create my own mix tapes and my commentary.

The work is not stressful, and even if it was, everyone is there to help you out, especially Julie Caine, my supervisor, and Leila Day, my mentor. They helped me throughout the entire process of my commentary. We also do listening assignments together and give feedback after we finished listening to those pieces. This bonding activity brings me closer to the KALW family and also helps me on my listening skills. If I could, I would do this internship again.

Note: The KALW Summer Internship Program will continue through July 31, 2014. Each intern will produce an on-air piece, along with the MixTapes they are currently producing for air. Stay tuned to hear about their experience and listen to their stories.