In the past ten weeks, I had the opportunity to intern for Oprah.com, a facet of O, the Oprah Magazine, at the Hearst Tower in New York City. If I said I knew I would have been here six months ago, I would be lying completely.
Applying was difficult, because I had to find all the contacts for the big magazines through my own research. I didn’t find Oprah.com or Oprah Magazine through the school—I found them on Ed2010 and applied the old fashioned way, the way that hundreds of journalists do at exactly the same time. I didn’t hear back from anybody until April, so really, I didn’t know what I would have been doing even as I was headed toward the end of the semester. The experience was stressful to say the least. When I was contacted by my (soon-to-be) supervisor to join the Oprah.com team, I was ecstatic and immediately started apartment scouting, which was also an activity I was doing on my own. The main thing I learned outside my internship experience was really how to survive the big city on my own, even if just for a few months. It was something I wasn’t sure I would successfully be able to do, and I’m glad I could.
Starting at Oprah.com was a whirlwind—the very day I got there, everyone on my team greeted me with open arms and told me that I already had my work cut out for me. I started in immediately with becoming the admin for The Oprah Magazine’s Facebook and answering messages, sorting books and writing 20 tweets pertaining to newer Oprah.com content. Within the next week or so I was already given a huge research project regarding social media trends on our own social media and other magazines’ social media, was building articles and slideshows on the website, going to ideas meetings with the entire team plus Chicago and Los Angeles, and helping the editors with their own projects by doing side research. They gave me just enough time to get acclimated, but I was certain that if I didn’t have previous web experience on me, I would have drowned. I kept up with the pace each week as the pressure kept on, and I was happy that it seemed to come naturally enough that I wasn’t too overwhelmed, ever. Eventually, by the end of the internship, they trusted me enough to be mediating contracts between freelancers and editors, and working out the Editor-in-Chief’s expense sheets. The last week I was there, we were all in our second ideas meeting and the Editor-in-Chief called on me to share my ideas, which I did, and a few of them were taken up by the staff to make the newsletter better. My experience could not have been more positive—I gained so much experience in the major magazine industry by working on a small team that gave me as much responsibility as they all had, and I was trusted the way a true employee is trusted. I was just recently contacted by them regarding freelance work, and I have started officially working for them as a freelancer as of yesterday. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had this internship, because this experience changed my life, and upped my chances at my dream job right out of school!