explore my optimistic world

This internship I’m currently taking at The Freeman teaches me one important thing...that one, two or three tasks can be done in a half-day.

The Freeman publishes daily, 6:00pm is the imposed deadline for all articles (news, sports, lifestyle, kid stuff, others). A reporter goes to field usually from 9 or 10:00 am and returns to the office at 1:30-3:00pm (depending on the event he is covering) to encode his gathered facts.

But before that, he first consults the news desk to “schedule” his article (that’s how they call it here, “schedule”). It is submitting the summarized detail of your article/s so that it will be included during the story conference of the editors at 4pm.

As interns, we also do the same route—gathering, scheduling, encoding, submitting the final output to the editors. We cannot go out from the office not unless the editors are done editting our works. At first, I thought I can’t make it, beating the 6:00pm deadline, but discipline has become my best teacher.

In the college publication where I work, I admit that there are times I cannot finish a single story in one week. I always find excuses why it is not done, “…because of this and that, all the alibis.”

But this stay at The Freeman makes me realize that laziness is the major reason why one cannot complete a task given a time as long as one week.

Here, one day is already enough or say, more than enough. But I also have to consider that here, it's a different business. We are focusing on the task as intern writers compared to college, where we have to attend to our biggest responsibility, as students, as molders of our own future.

Nevertheless, The Freeman taught me to be hard-working and to maintain the discipline in order to handle the things they are adopting here. Here, there’s a strict implementation of policies, but one surely gains a lot from this tough system.