Zoe Sobel is a senior psychology major. She is a member of the varsity track and field team and a head athlete mentor. In addition to her internship with WBUR, she is a DJ for WZLY.
As a student-athlete, I considered it next to impossible to have an internship during the school year. My sport, track, runs from October until the end of the school year. With two to three hours of practice every day and all-day Saturday meets, it is hard fitting in other activities.
This year, I was lucky to intern with NPR and WBUR’s Only A Game. National Public Radio (NPR) prides itself on great storytelling and rigorous reporting. Although NPR is based in Washington D.C., there are local affiliates all across the country. WBUR is Boston’s NPR affiliate and is run out of Boston University. Affiliates will play national programing such as Fresh Air, All Things Considered, or Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! as well as local programming that they produce themselves. Only A Game (OAG) is one of these local programs.
The weekly OAG show plays on more than 200 stations. The show is NPR’s sports show and covers everything from mainstream sports to more obscure skillet tossing. Since OAG is broadcast on Saturdays, the beginning of the week is more relaxed. Stories for the show cannot be set in stone on Mondays because breaking news may occur later in the week. However, the show requires some outline due to the scheduling of guest interviews.
For these reasons, the show has several different types of radio stories. We primarily feature “two-ways” interviews between the guest and most often the host, Bill Littlefield. We also deviate from straight interviews with “features,” which tell a story and are often written by freelance journalists. Additionally, there are commentaries where one person will speak regarding a specific subject.
The staff at OAG is very small – a host, three producers, a technical director, and me, the intern. The host is the voice that you hear on the air for the majority of the show. The three producers all have slightly different tasks, but they range from booking interviews, writing questions for interviews, cutting interviews, editing features, and cross checking each others work. The technical director mixes all the separate segments together, so there’s a constant sound. With such a small staff, working for OAG is a lot like being on an athletic team. Many of the skills I’ve learned as an athlete are transferable to my role at OAG.
The majority of my work as an intern is turning our audio content into web content. For example, I may transcribe the two-way interviews or incorporate the interview quotes into a story. I also convert/transform the features and commentary scripts into reader friendly form. These two tasks require extremely high attention to detail. Everything posted must be fact checked, grammatically correct, spelled properly, and conformed to AP Style. As a track athlete, attention to detail is very important because form is very important. During an event you must focus on all of your movements at all times to be as efficient as possible.
In track, and life, you cannot allow one bad performance affect you. You have to let go. When I pitch a story to the show and it isn’t chosen, I have to let it go. There are many factors why it [my suggestion] may have not made the final show – you have to persevere despite set backs.
As an athlete, I have spent years training to become a better athlete. Hard work and dedication are some of the most transferable skills to my internship. The harder I work, the more I get out of my position. I am able to sit in on more interviews, to go into the field on stories. I am able to get my own byline on the show.
When working in such a small group communication is key. There can be some overlap in tasks, so I have to ensure my coworkers know what I am doing and that we don’t overlap. Time management goes along with communication. As an athlete with a hectic schedule, adding an internship makes efficiency even more important so that I can be involved in more things that I enjoy.
As a varsity athlete, I made the conscious decision to devote most of my free time to my sport. Regardless of my performance on the track, my time was not wasted. I will be leaving Wellesley with an arsenal of effective and marketable skills that have and will continue to help me succeed in the workplace.
– Zoe Sobel ’14