Recent Posts
Reflecting on my time at Entity, it’s hard to determine what part of me changed the most. I’ve become more disciplined, worked harder than I thought I was capable and learned everything from how to write for a magazine to surveillance laws across the world. One thing is for sure, however: throughout the time I’ve spent at Entity, I’ve grown significantly.
Entity has taught me so much about discipline. As summer approached, I realized that instead of waking up in the afternoon and slumming it at the beach everyday wasn’t going to be a part of my summer plans. Instead, it was waking up at six in the morning and heading off to work until five in the evening. Don’t get me wrong–I loved every minute of it. What’s interesting was that Entity taught me how to live a disciplined and consistent lifestyle through bringing me back again and again to a job I adored. Although I’m looking forward to the future that Entity has prepared me for, it’s unfortunate that I won’t be waking up every weekday morning to write for Entity.
Another thing that Entity taught me was how to be creative with my writing while maintaining my own personal flair that distinguishes my work from someone else’s. If you look at my writing from the beginning of my internship at Entity and read what I’ve been writing recently, it’s impossible to not see a difference and how much it’s changed. My writing is more stylized, it penetrates the heart of the subject matter I discuss instead of dancing around it like in a game of musical chairs. With the help of writing workshop and Jennifer’s mentoring, I was able to define what my writing should read as for an Internet audience, a task that by no means is a piece of cake.
Which brings me to the last way in which I grew: I was challenged. It really isn’t easy writing for a magazine–you’re constantly engaging your reader with questions, references, puns, jokes, powerful statements, et cetera. It takes a lot of work to produce a piece of magazine-style writing audiences of today can digest and synthesize information from. In some cases, you have to know your audience even better than the subject matter itself. For instance, if you’re writing a piece on jet propulsion, you have to explain it with terms that your audience will understand, especially if you, yourself, don’t fully understand it. But even though it was frustrating for me at times to crank out pieces of journalism with a style and tone that I wasn’t used to, it completely revitalized my writing and allowed me to produce more interesting, entertaining pieces, unlike the typical college papers I’m used to.
These are just a few of the ways I grew at Entity during my summer internship. I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to undergo these transformations not only in my writing but also in my personal life. I struggled a lot with disciplining myself to do work, especially in college where all I want to do is hang out and talk to my friends. I leave Entity as a more disciplined, talented and creative writer, and that’s more than all I could have asked for out of a summer internship.
