The law of attraction appears to be at work… It’s as though cool experiences are drawn to my gravitational force, when I choose to use it. Since age 16 I’ve managed to find jobs I’m really proud of and that truly match my interests. My first job in high school was at a music store owned by a family friend. Besides chatting it up with college musicians in the office every day, I got paid to DJ parties and videotape plays and dance recitals. Talk about an awesome first job. I worked there until college, where I seamlessly found a job doing video production for the university starting my first week of freshman year. After four years there, I am now an FCP expert.
Internships haven’t done me wrong either. I had a journalism internship working at the Beijing Olympics last summer…enough said right there. And this summer I had a social media internship for a national nonprofit in Washington D.C. Of course, the week after that one ended I started another one a few blocks down the street. I don’t seem to want to leave Dupont Circle (who would?). I’ve been at New America Media (NAM) for three weeks now and am enjoying every minute of it.
NAM is like the AP service for ethnic media and something I discovered during my sophomore year of college as a place I’d love to work at in the future. They’re headquartered in San Francisco, and though I’d love to end up there someday, being in the small D.C. office has its perks. My supervisor is great and tries to provide me with a variety of projects. The main thing we’ve been preoccupied with is planning an environmental conference in Phoenix on October 8th (my birthday, what a coincidence), which will bring local social justice groups and ethnic media together in an effort to combat environmental issues in the Southwest.
Besides conference outreach, I’m also doing a profile on the Navajo-Hopi Observer, a newspaper that covers Native American news in northeast Arizona. It will be part of NAM’s profile series where people learn about different ethnic media around the country, what makes them unique and how they are surviving the economic recession. Another thing I’m excited about is writing Spanish-language media briefs. Last week I started translating Spanish-language news stories and summarizing them in English so that other ethnic media know what topics their fellow news outlets are covering. What a great way to keep up my Spanish skills!
New America Media is all about conveying the unheard voices in our society, including minority ethnic groups, the elderly, women, and even young people. One venue that allows NAM to give voice to incarcerated youth is The Beat Within, a program that encourages kids in juvenile detention centers to share their thoughts and life experiences. I’ve read several poems that a few teenagers from the Oak Hill Youth Detention Center in D.C. wrote and they are truly enlightening. They reveal an alternative view of real D.C. life, outside of the politics and tourism that most people use to define the nation’s capital. My supervisor runs the literacy workshop every week and I can’t wait to get more involved in the program.
NAM overall is a great place to work and needless to say I love my current job, as is always the case. I make sure whatever work I do involves my passions. It’s an easy thing to achieve really. I’ll be doing some video projects for NAM too, no joke… With every job before now I’ve had it made, and my luck after graduation has been no different. So let’s keep it up shall we.
Leave a comment