Week 1
Date: Tuesday 24 January & 25 January Total Hours: 12
What an eventful first week at my internship with "This is London Magazine." I am doing my internship with Lucy Thomas, another student from Central so we work as a team to get tasks done that we are assigned. Both days we ventured out to Stansted on the Central Line (zone 3) where we met Julie and Beth Jones, a mother-daughter team that runs the magazine. The "office" they use is in a coffee shop/art gallery called Stour Space. It's right on the river and in the area of the Olympic Park, one of them picks us up in their car and we drive through Olympic Security to get to Stour Space. We did a variety of things this week all over London.
On Tuesday Beth explained how formatting the magazine works and how to convert a long press release into a 200 word preview that goes into the magazine (it's called subbing). There was a press event that she also told us about and gave us directions to. Then we took off to get everything done. First we went to the V&A museum where the press viewing of the new "Golden Spider Silk" exhibit was taking place. It was very cool, the silk comes out of the spider already gold, and it took 1.5 million spiders to make both of the pieces the exhibit was showing. It was in a very posh neighborhood, but I really enjoyed it and want to go back to the V&A and have a look around on my own. We then returned to Vandon where we did some computer work. Lucy proofread a script of the magazine while I wrote a piece about the V&A exhibit. We spent the next few hours subbing, we each did seven. Some of mine included: Shrek the Musical, Laila Shawa and the annual flamenco festival at Saddler's Wells. We emailed them to Julie and called it a night. Well, almost :) the magazine gets a lot of free tickets to shows and events, so we went and saw the show "Ladykillers." I'd say that was a pretty successful first day.
Day two wasn't quite as glamorous as day one. We met Beth and she gave us our duties for the day and then sent us back on our way. We walked for an hour from Victoria Station to St. John Smith center to get some pamphlets to send to the lady who helps with advertising. We returned to Vandon to finish proofing the subbings and sent them back in. She wanted us to practice writing as well, so I did a piece about Ladykillers last night. The only thing I would have done different would be take a different route to St. John Smith, we walked around for a very long time when we could have gone another, more efficient route.
I had some cultural experiences, nothing major, but I noticed some differences from my home culture. I'm not really a coffee fan but I know it's rude not to accept when someone offers to buy you either coffee or tea, so I tried a cappuccino. Minus the caffeine high it wasn't too bad, and it helped me fit in better culturally with the group I was with. While subbing I had to get used to some differences in British grammar/spelling. Simple differences like the words "colour" and "favourite" weren't recognized in Microsoft Word and I had to remember that that's how it's spelled here. And finally, it wasn't totally part of my internship but seeing Ladykillers gave me my first insight into British humor, which it was packed with. It's not exactly the type of humor I'm used to, but by the end I was laughing along with everyone else.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed week one of my internship.
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