Since this is a radio internship, there aren’t any classes that helped me prepare for this internship directly; however, there were some classes that had certain aspects that assisted me in this internship thus far. The first class that assisted me was public speaking. All these years, I assumed that I didn’t learn from public speaking because I’m still pretty shy when it comes to speaking to crowds, but I have noticed that I’m able to enunciate much better than I used to. I’ve been inside a radio station before and have had the chance to speak on air before I got to college. While I enjoyed the thrill of talking on air, I couldn’t seem to overcome the shyness. Even though more than 3 years later I am still shy, I was told I sounded pretty good for how shy I claim to be.

The second class that has helped me during this internship is the advanced media writing course. One of the things I help out with for this internship is coming in with news stories (both local and national) that can be discussed on air. One of the biggest assignments we did in the advanced media writing course was the five week reporting assignment. With this, we were required to bring in a completed news story each week to be added to our portfolio. While for the internship, I’m not required to write out an entire story, the weekly reporting project helped me learn how to find news stories even when you don’t think there are any out there. With the skills learned from this assignment, I have been able to bring in multiple stories on a daily basis.

The last class that has helped me with this internship is the digital storytelling class. One of the most important aspects of segueing up the radio show is making sure that the songs are tightly edited. If there is any silence on the radio, audience members begin to assume something is wrong with the station and will switch channels, in turn making the station lose listeners. In digital storytelling, we were taught techniques to edit our documentaries to be tightly edited, and while this was primarily focused on video, one of the tricks the Dr. Stouffer taught us about was how to layer audio in a appealing way. We use this layering technique when transitioning between a song and a commercial so I strongly believe this is one of the reasons it didn’t take me long to learn about segueing the show.