Ambition takes you out of your comfort zone, into opportunity
One thing the Bleacher Report Sports Media Internship has taught me about the journalism field is the importance of being ambitious.
I came into the internship with a comfort zone that included writing about college football and the NFL, the NBA and MLB. But because I’ve taken on extra assignments, I will leave this internship with advanced knowledge of golf, hockey, horse racing and more.
Being able to effectively cover these sports, some of which aren’t as mainstream as the NFL or NBA, makes me a far more versatile writer. That in turn makes me a more desirable candidate for further opportunities.
When the internship started, I wanted to take as many assignments as I could. That meant writing as many stories as possible during my on-call sessions, branching out with a variety of topics for my weekly assignments and taking every extra opportunity I was given.
Not only did my writing improve drastically over the first month, I also had the privilege of participating in a trial session with B/R’s Breaking News Team. This meant I got to work with an editor from BNT for a six-hour on-call session. This was the most fun I have had with the internship, as I got to experience what it’s like to be a full-time writer with B/R.
Writing articles about a wide range of topics fun for me, and I also got to interact with over a dozen members of the BNT. That interaction was the best part of the trial, as I felt like I truly fit in with the team after jawing back and forth with some of the writers about how good Kansas State is.
Overall, this internship has been an amazing process that has put me on the track I want to be on at this point in my career. The biggest lesson I will take away from it is, if you are ambitious, you will always find a place in sports journalism.
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Sean Frye is in the Spring class. Follow him on Twitter @Sean_E_Frye.
One Thing You Need to Know is a series in which we ask our interns to write about just that: One thing they’ve learned in the B/R Sports Media Internship that they would pass along to other aspiring writers.