by Christopher Duclos

The Olympia Legislative Reporting Internship is a fantastic training opportunity for students who hope to become political reporters, or want to find out what a career in political journalism might entail. For the past 40 years, Communication undergrads have been sent to work as interns covering the Olympia Legislature. This year’s interns and the publications they will be contributing to are as follows: Zoey Palmer, Washington Newspaper Publishers Association; Kylee Zabel, WNPA; Jillian Stampher, UW Daily; Devon Geary, TVW ; Alexandra Kocik, Northwest Public Radio; Jimmy Lovaas, McClatchy Newspapers; Amelia Dickson, Seattle Times; and Thomas James, Crosscut.com.

While the students have prior experience writing and contributing to professional news sources, the Olympia internship gives them a different setting in which to write.  The students are working directly with the editor or news director of their organization on full-time schedules throughout the quarter. To be able to cover the latest breaking news coming from the Legislature, they are also living in or near Olympia.

Kocik says she will be taking the internship as an opportunity to experience a taste of a career in radio journalism while writing for Northwest News Network. Kocik, a student from Western Washington University, heard about this career opportunity through email. “I have extensive writing and video editing experience, but have never done work for radio broadcast before,” she said. “I want to learn everything I can about audio editing and writing for the radio medium, which is turning out to be very different from anything I experienced while working on student publications.”

Not all interns are focused on contributing to print and radio. Geary hopes her career will involve travelling the world. “My career goal has always been to be a photojournalist for Smithsonian or National Geographic and to travel. I want to learn about and understand the cultures of individuals who have lives completely different from my own,” she said. “My ultimate goal is to eliminate social divide by increasing people’s knowledge about others living around/far from them.”

All of the interns hope to get a better idea of what career they would like to pursue with the help of this internship. With that in mind, Zabel said, “I believe this internship will allow me to take the next step in my college career. I am hopeful that I will be able to make a clearer decision on what career path I would like to follow in the future and what plans I should be making for post-graduation.”

In her future, Palmer says she would like “to write for a living on a topic that interests me: politics, technology, and social justice are examples that immediately come to mind. I would also like to try working in audio or video journalism, although my internship will be focused on print.” When asked about what they hope to achieve from the internship, Stampher said “I hope to learn more about how the legislative session works and how members of the Legislature interact and plan bills.” Stampher, excited about being selected for the program, continued, “I think this internship will help round me out as a reporter and hopefully set me up for future internships. Working at the capitol of Washington State will show I can handle deadlines and complicated legislation for stories. I haven’t decided exactly what kind of journalism I want a career in after I graduate in June 2013, so I hope this will help me decide if radio is the right path for me.”