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An ENTITY Magazine writer shares her internship reflection.

The summer before my last semester at college, I received the most amazing news. I had just gotten a slot at an internship for a new women’s magazine. Entity magazine would be launched summer 2016 and I was one of the few interns selected to be a part of that memorable journey. I was honored, excited, but most of all I was petrified. This was going to be a dip into the real life end and I could only hope my time in college had prepared me for it.

I was right to be scared, it did turn out to be quite challenging, but I never anticipated how rewarding those challenges would be. Writing for an online magazine was vastly different than anything I had ever done before. Here are 3 ways my experience at Entity challenged me, but forced me to grow.

1 A Whole Lot Of Writing

If you think about the amount of papers I’ve written in my years of schooling, you could probably publish a novel. As a journalism major, I was accustomed to writing more papers than anything, but that still wasn’t enough. The original goal at Entity was to write an average of 25 articles per week. While that has been tweaked a bit, the amount of content expected is a lot higher than I ever imagined. Was I mad about this? Not even a little. It forced me to write faster and get right to it. In school, deadlines were always so far away that I would procrastinate as much as possible. I learned to work hard and play later.

2 Expanded My Horizons

Luckily for me most of the topics I’d written about school were to my choosing. True, sometimes the professors would give us a general idea what they were looking for, but the specifics were up to us. And I loved that, I could write about the things that I was passionate about, that I had interests in. At Entity we were assigned topics from a wide range of subjects. I was forced to do a lot more research in order to learn about things beyond my knowledge. In “real life” you’re not always going to make your own assignments. I got to learn about things that were extremely interesting, that I may not have ever learned about.

3 A New Writing Style

In school I had been taught three main forms of writing: newspaper, magazine, and broadcast. I thought that my knowledge with those three forms would easily transfer over, but writing for an online publication was drastically different. Online readers are known to have a shorter attention span than those who seek publications with long form articles. They want to get the information quick and easy or they’ll click on. It was challenging to have to adapt my style completely, but also very important considering the amount of media transferring over to online forms.

 

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