Unexpected lessons learned

I had the wonderful opportunity for the past 10 weeks to be an intern at the Foster County Independent, and here I am to tell you about the wild summer I had. I never expected the skills that I would learn and develop through the experience.

I graduated from Carrington High School in 2023 and just completed my first semester of college in the spring. I am attending the University of North Dakota and pursuing a degree in forensic science.

At the end of the school year, I was not entirely sure what I wanted to do with my summer vacation, but I knew that I needed to find a job.

I had looked around at different businesses in Carrington. And then finally one day my dad was looking at the newspaper and saw the advertisement for a summer internship at the Independent. He had showed it to me, and I thought to myself, “Hey, that can’t be too bad of a job. I’ll try it out.” So, I applied for the job, did an interview, and you could about imagine what happened next. I got the job!

I did not fully know what to expect when I first started, but I eventually figured things out amidst the chaos that is behind the scenes of a weekly newspaper. I was taught many, many new things that I never thought I would ever learn or need to know because I am a science major, not a journalism student. Despite that, I fully believe that even though I may not use some of the skills that I learned, the way I view some things will be forever changed.

I wouldn’t say that I had just one job to do throughout the summer, it was whatever Amy or the other staff needed me to do, I would do it.

I did a little bit of photography, writing, designing, cleaning, etc. However, the one thing that no one else did, while I was there, was perforate raffle tickets, and that is one tedious task. I managed to make it through 3,750 raffle tickets and survived!

Perforating is just one of the many steps in preparing raffle tickets. After Leasa created the raffle ticket she tasked me with figuring out the steps on how to number them in a newer program. Let me tell you, we both struggled for about an hour trying to figure it out the first time. I eventually decided to look it up on YouTube and got it done within 15 minutes. After figuring the process out, we printed the tickets. Then I had to sit there and perforate every single one and then staple them into booklets. Even though it was a tedious task it kept me entertained for hours on end and gave me a nice leg workout.

Other print jobs I helped with included padding various notebooks. I cut the paper with a huge paper cutter and then lined them up to be padded with a special compound glue.

I would never consider myself a professional photographer, however, when I was given the right camera with a long lens I would take some amazing pictures. The events I normally took photos at were baseball games (they let me use the big camera with the long lens).

I also was asked to take pictures for our Fourth of July parade. If you can remember what the weather was like that day, and if you don’t, I believe the right saying is, “It was raining cats and dogs.” Even so, I was not deterred by the pouring rain as someone had to take pictures. I had my hoodie on, a bag over my camera and my poor mother holding an umbrella and blocking most of the rain for me, while I got some cool pictures of everyone struggling or enjoying the rain.

If I were asked to do that again I would pretend that I hadn’t heard you. After taking the pictures I had to edit them, so I got familiar with Photoshop. I learned how to edit the pictures so that they were brighter when they are printed as well as how to turn them into black and white.

Another skill that I learned was how to lay out the pages for the paper on InDesign. At first, I was a little hesitant to do that because the only things that I had set up before were a couple of posters for various projects throughout high school. With a little help from Amy and Lori, I got the hang of it pretty fast; I even got to set up the pages by myself one time! The computer that I worked on did not like to cooperate sometimes, so I learned a great deal of patience waiting for documents to load.

Along with setting up the paper, I had to help proofread the different stories so that there were no spelling or punctuation errors. In high school, and still now in college, I am the designated proofreader of papers, so I am no stranger to it. Along with proofreading the stories we must look at the ads, so two of us had to read the ads before giving Leasa the ok to put them on the page.

I even wrote a couple stories myself. I was a little nervous about writing and having it published in the paper, but everyone told me that my stories were great, so it eased my nerves.

I helped with laminating items that customers would bring in. There was one time that someone came in to laminate around 100 sheets. Afterwards I felt like I had burnt my fingertips off, but all is well, and I still have fingerprints.

I honestly did not think I would have this much fun this summer and thought it would be a little boring, but it was quite the opposite. I will take the skills that I learned here with me throughout my life, and I will try not to forget them. I am so grateful for this opportunity and am so happy that I did not just dismiss the ad as something boring. If anyone were to ask me in the future if they should do the internship I would highly encourage them to take the position. I have no bad words to say about the people I worked with here or the work that I had to do!