My name is AnneLiese Nachman, and I am going into my Junior year at Penn State, University Park. This summer was the first time I had an internship experience, and it went quite well. One day a week, I went to the Public Broadcasting building at Innovation Park to work with Diane Espy, who is a Senior Producer and Director for WPSU.

I helped her with her Beekeeping 101 project, which is an online course being offered by Penn State World Campus this Fall. I was able to see the ins and outs of making an online course equipped with video footage of a bee farm, and commentary by the two Penn State Cooperative Extension educators who are teaching the course. I met one of them, Tom Butzler, at a call-in show that I helped with at the WPSU studio. The show — called “Get Your Garden On!” — was hosted by Patty Satalia, whom I met afterwards. It was a lot of fun being in the control room for the live show. I was in charge of intercepting emails and Tweets of viewers’ questions and sending them on to the teleprompter for Patty to read. It was an exciting experience!

I was able to go with Diane’s film crew on a number of video shoots.  We shot some footage in State College for Beekeeping 101 ‘B-roll” of people browsing the course.  I also went to the Conewago Creek in Elizabethtown, PA, where we recorded student interns from the Conewago Creek Initiative doing a stream bank assessment in Hoffer Creek. Once we finished our shoot at the creek, we visited a local farm to get footage for Conewago Creek Collaborative Initiative, a showcase watershed effort video that Diane is working on for Kristen Saacke Blunk in the Agriculture and Environment Center. By attending these video shoots, I have learned a great deal of what is involved in doing a live, outdoor shoot.

I do have an interest in videography, though it is not my major. I have made a few videos for class and for fun, but this internship is really eye-opening as to the way film is done professionally. I am able to explore all of the different jobs that go into making a video, from the very detailed job of video editing to being a producer.

My internship allowed me to learn about jobs and opportunities that I would never have known existed had I not taken this internship.  We always hear of jobs that people expect you to choose from, such as being a doctor, lawyer, or a teacher. No one ever tells you that you could be a cruise line director, a video editor, or a person who decides what color the buttons should be on a new control panel for an aircraft. I am on an expedition to find all of these unique jobs that no one ever talks about, and interning has proved to be a very good research method. My search started here, and who knows where I’ll end up interning next!