My internship was in 2018, I believe, that summer and I was super excited when I got accepted. It was in Cape Town, South Africa, I had never been to Africa before. So it was just all around an amazing experience and I had always been known to be the friend in college who was gone during the summer doing really cool internships. And I would say that this was by far the most cool internship I've ever had to the point where it's been like a major talking point with employers after I graduated.

It was a news internship, and the reason why I applied for that is because I wanted to be a news reporter after I graduated college, so this was just another milestone. This was a public access channel in a sense, so we would actually do news reports. There was an anchor and I was the news intern, which, my responsibility, for the most part, was to gather and to put the stories together. I was acting as a reporter so on any given day, the producer there would be filtering through the news of that day, looking through the newspapers. You were also helping, trying to figure out what was big, what happened overnight. And then we would talk about what places we should go to and they always sent someone with me, who was from there because obviously the language barrier. But I do appreciate how hands on it all was. They could have just had me sitting in the office and just writing, but they actually sent me out into the townships. I felt like a local while I was there the whole time, you know. And we covered really cool stories, really happy stories. And sometimes we covered really cruel and really sad stories too. But that is the nature of news, wherever you are. They would send us out with the driver, we would take the camera, equipment, we would go door knocking, talking to people, asking them if they would do an interview with us, and then I would ask them questions, the person who was from there, who also worked at the news station, would translate, and then translate for both of us. I would come back, transcribe, and then write the story and then edit it together. And then it would actually air on their station.

You don't want to be scared. You want to take risks. You want to be bold. And those were some of the things that I had to do while I was interning in Cape Town. Being bold, being nervous, not being from here, not speaking the language, but still having the confidence to go and hold a mic in front of someone who was chanting at a major protest. I still have that video, I believe, somewhere, where she grabbed the mic and she was basically very passionately talking. You know, I could have stood by and just watched, but that was kind of the start of who I was as a journalist. I was fearless. I was ready to get to the scene, tell the story, find the people, stand out in the hurricanes, make sure people were safe. That really carried over into my professional life and just the way that I think. I mean, I go after things that many people might not go after, and I shoot high. I don't like to play safe.