Two days ago the man who will be my mentor during my internship sent me a mail yesterday asking me to tell him a bit about me, my ambitions and my expectations. I did so and figured that I might as well use the reply as a blog post. The info under "author" doesn't say much about me and those of you who havn't followed my blog since the start probably don't know me that well. The paper I will be doing my internship at is called Fokus. It's a paper that comes out once a week and it's about everything and anything really.
The mail:
I am 21 years old and have been studying journalistics at Mittuniversitetet in Sundsvall. The internship will be my fourth. Last semester I got to choose between three areas of focus, TV, radio and paper/writing. I chose writing as my goal is to be a writing journalist in the future. The paper of my dreams is Illustrerad Vetenskap ("Illustrated science" in English, it's a science paper that explains various science in a way anyone can understand.). Science at a basic level is a special interest for me but I think almost every kind of journalistics is fun as I always learn something new from it. I rather take a little time and go in depth about something than to go to an interview fast, write, and then have it done an hour later. That is also the reason I chose Fokus before daily papers.
During the interviews with the employees at Fokus (named in the letter but I'll leave them anonymous here) I got to know that I'd start off with the table of content, editing and such things, which sounds like a good start to me. I have taken a course in editing with Indesign (an editing program) and I'm alright at it. I got to know that I'd be able to do more writing of my own later, which I of course look forward to. I expect that it will be a lot about smaller side things while the larger things go to the full time employees. I think that's a good thing as it should mean that I get to do a lot of different thins, which I learn the most from. I do however have as an ambition to contribute to one of the main articles some time in some way during my internship.
A bit about me: I'm a chess player and a runner, now at an amateur level but among the best of my age when I was younger. When I focus on something it tends to be wholeheartedly. Last summer I worked some weeks as a journalist at the paper Bättre Stadsdel and I have worked as a sports trainer and chess trainer for kids earlier. I have also had a dozen roles or so as an actor and extra, the most well known one is probably the woodpecker in the Treo (a headache pill) advertisement that was on tv 2014 - 2015. During my spare time I sometimes write humorous poetry, among other things limericks.
That was the end of the mail.
I'll write one other thing too, last friday I might have experienced the lowest temperature in my life, -23. It was -26 during the day but I wasn't outside then. It wasn't that terrible the ten minutes I was outside, -23 here probably equals -13 in Stockholm, there's something about the air that makes Stockholm colder. Neither is anything compared to a place two hours to the west and five hours to the north however, they had -42. The coldest ever in Sweden is -52 but that pales compared to the Vostok station in antarctica where the lowest safely measured temperature is -89, which is the coldest in the world. All of this in celsius, cooooooooold.