May 19, 2022, by admin

Written by Karl Cranston Simmons

As a senior at Pacific High School, I’ve been thinking a lot about my future education and career goals for the past year. I’ve done some journalism work and am thinking about making it my career, but I didn’t know how to pursue this goal over the rest of the school year.

When I was looking for a job, Pacific High made it easy and helpful. My crew teacher Matt Groen (the equivalent of a homeroom teacher) has a post-it board at the entrance of his classroom with available jobs throughout the community. Additionally, some scholarships and internships too. I saw this job on the post-it board and I saw that some aspects of the job dealt with blog posts and writing, and I thought I had to do it. My teacher Matt helped me revise my application, and I eventually got the position.

It’d be good to mention my previous experience with this kind of work, specifically with the Alaska Teen Media Institute, simply known as ATMI. In the summer of 2021, I first applied to be an ATMI Youth Producer, and I’ve done a lot of exciting work with them. The mentors there, Rosey Robards, Cody Liska, and John Kendall have helped me greatly with refining my writing skills. In June of 2021, I did my first interview. It was an online interview with the Anchorage rapper Fairview Treezy, through this interview I was able to learn more about the interview process and how to ask the right questions.

This previous experience provided the groundwork for my work here at the Science Center. As a production assistant, one of my main tasks is workshopping questions for the staff at the Science Center and interviewing them. Jay Stilwell, the Marketing & Business Director at the Science Center, has helped me with brainstorming questions and writing blog posts. Jay has also helped me with my writing skills, as I’ve had to adapt to the different writing styles that blog posts use rather than the writing style of a podcast episode. Through my work here I’ve learned new skills in writing and went out of my comfort zone.

When I interviewed Chris Balovich it was my first interview on the phone, instead of a face-to-face interview or one on Zencastr, Zencastr being an online meeting site like Zoom but built for online interviews. This was just something I’d never done before, but I was able to effectively record and write down all of Chris’ answers and write a good blog post based on those answers. Through this experience, I feel more confident in doing interviews no matter the medium, whether it’s a Zencastr call, an in-person interview, or a simple phone call.

My first interview at the Science Center was itself a good learning experience. For the first blog post about SPIFy, I interviewed Bill Coltharp and Blake Conaway. Originally I was supposed to interview them both separately, but both were expecting to be interviewed so I decided to adapt to the situation. Since both of them were there, I thought it would possibly result in a good conversation between the two. I ended up being really satisfied with the interview, and it built more confidence for future interviews.

As I’ve mentioned, to write these blog posts I had to use a different writing style I still wasn’t familiar with. When I began writing the post for Blake and Bill, I was still writing as if I was on a radio show or podcast episode. With good feedback from staff though, I was eventually able to effectively learn a new writing style that better fits a blog post with no audio.

In order to effectively write these blog posts, I had a lot of help from Jay Stilwell. The process of writing these blogs has been efficient and helpful. Writing a complete blog post, can take me as little as three days, which is how long it took me to write the CBC Construction post. Before this though, my first article took me about two weeks. Over the course of this internship, I’ve progressively improved in this type of writing. Each post typically involves lots of revisions and paying attention to every detail of the text. This can involve looking for ways to explain something in a simpler way, not overcomplicating things, adding more flair or personality to a post, and simply just looking for grammar and spelling errors. These factors in writing a blog post can also differ depending on the subject. Overall, these are skills I’ve been learning from both the Science Center and ATMI. As I go to study at UAA next year and major in Journalism, I feel these skills are going to help me greatly with my courses and my future career.