Internship an 'eye-opening' experience
in a 'learning' and 'working' world

When Dennis Cripe E-mailed me to let me know that I had received an IHSPA advisor internship, I was expecting to get my hands on some great, professional equip- ment and to learn some new tricks that I could take back to my classroom. I did. But I also learned more than just practical photography and design skills. I became the student and walked a mile in the shoes of my staff members. My strength is photography, so I spent the bulk of my internship working with the photogs. I went on assignment with them, enterprised my own photo assignments and digitally prepared pictures for print. I had the chance to use the incredible Nikon DX-1 and a full range of lens and then put

Sara Kiesler, left, was surprised to find out that her high school adviser, John Wells, also was an intern this summer at the Evansville Courier & Press. Kiesler, a DePauw journalism major, and Wells worked together on a feature story for the paper. Mostly, Wells worked as a photographer.

my images through state of the art digital imagine software. I even had several pictures printed, including a color photo on the front of the local section. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I do, but I learned that I was not all that my students might have thought I was. I could look at a photo and know whether it was a good picture or not and if I would recommend its use in our yearbook or newspaper. But I was not able to realize and verbalize what made it good or bad. It was only after working with these professionals that I saw why a cluttered background or extraneous subjects in the frame would ruin a picture. I found out why the cropping worked in some instances and not in others. I was surrounded by experts and they showed me all they knew. I already knew that the best pictures were those that captured the moment and the emotion of that moment, but the photogs I was working with opened my eyes to also include pictures that set the scene, showing the enormity and the size of what I was shooting. It just gave my set of photos more depth and better told the whole story. But the most important lesson I learned reminded me what it was like to be a staffer, responsible for assignments and expected to do an accurate, complete and good job every time I was given a task to do. I got a dose of what it was like to be given directions that I might not have totally understood and I was given both positive and negative feedback when I brought back my pictures. I remember now what it was like when I was just a lowly staff member who had his pictures or writing reviewed, corrected and then choosen or not for publication.It is important that we balance what we see as our job as teachers and our job as advisers. We have to teach our students the skills necessary for them to both produce something that they and the school will be proud of as well as give them real-world skills that might help them break into a position in the exciting field of journalism. We have to give them the chance to fail as well as succeed. At the same time, in the role of advisor, we have to make the tough decisions that will lead to a newspaper or yearbook that our administration will accept and will guarantee our continued employment. At the Evansville Courier and Press, I was there to learn. The paper was there to take me by the hand to teach me as much as it could to make me the best teacher I could be. But I was also an employee, contributing to a commercial paper whose first job was to make a product they could sell and add to the bottom line of Scripps Howard. Learning and working go hand in hand, but there were times when one has to take precedence over the other. And so too do our students have to wade through that conflict. Hopefully, this summer's experience will allow me to work better with my students, helping them so they can learn and work in a professional setting at the same time. I am sure that it did.