Mason makes careers

Sarah Weimar is a junior Communication major at Mason with a minor in Multimedia Studies. She hopes to become a branding consultant with a marketing firm when she graduates. Weimar interns for the popular radio station WTOP Radio.

How did you ­find out about this internship? I had a contact who worked at WTOP radio and he mentioned that there were internships. I went and did a pre-interview, and he basically thought I was a go-getter and would get a good experience out of the internship.

How will this internship help with your future aspirations? Any experience is good experience. Even though I’m not entirely interested in the radio portion of the internship, it does help strengthen my writing and interviewing skills. I’m a communication major but I’m interested in marketing and branding so I do a little of everything. I’ve had to do a lot of photography, photo editing and video for the web. It’s not directly related to what I think I want to do but I’m very open to new experiences that will help me narrow down what I want enjoy doing. What is a typical day on the job like? A typical day is waking up at 5 a.m., momentarily hating life and getting to the station at 7a.m.. The internship is in DC so dealing with DC drivers was an adjustment as well. When I get to the station, I work with a guy named Neil Augustine who’s been on the radio for many years.

The projects vary from day to day, usually Neil will flip the stories that were on the page yesterday and we’ll work on the new stories. I’ve done woman-on-the-street reporting, over-the-phone interviews and helped Neil shoot video. There’s always a lot going on. There’s TVs and WTOP Radio playing everywhere around the station. They even have the radio playing in the bathrooms so you always know what’s going on in the journalism world. I do whatever projects we’re working on that day then I drive back to campus at one in the afternoon. Have you seen or met any famous people? I mostly come in contact with political figures. Once, I got locked outside the station with Tim Kaine, which was pretty funny. As an intern, I didn’t have a key to get us in the building. I’ve been told that some of the TV news reporters I’ve meet are big deals but I didn’t know who they were. I’ve worked with reporters like Tucker Echols from the Washington Business Journal and of course Neil Augustine. I get so excited now when I hear their voices on the radio because I interact with these people at the station. How have your past experiences help prepare you for this internship?

When I got to college, I didn’t really pursue anything in journalism for a while and so this internship kind of reignited my journalism bug. I would definitely say that my experience with interrupting people’s lives, getting in their business, photographing and interviewing has helped me be more comfortable with it now. Everything I have done up to this point has taught me how to be fearless in a way. Doing things out of my comfort zone has given me thicker skin. Most importantly, you have to learn how to face rejection. A personal motto of mine is when I’m scared, do it anyway. What is the most challenging part of working at the radio station? There was a lot of hype that came with the job but also a lot of pressure too. I don’t think I’ve relaxed since I started. The writing itself has been the most challenging but not because my writing isn’t good but because it’s not the voice that WTOP writes in. I’m from a completely different generation then their older target audience. Not only that, I’m working on the tech page and since our target audience is older, they want technology they’re familiar with. There not super tech savvy. So what we do is focus on things that they would care about, which isn’t necessarily that same kind of technology that I would care about. We focus less on how it works and more on how it’s relevant. Anything radio related has also been a challenge. What is your ideal job? I think I would want to be a details manager for a company or do a little of what I’m doing now, which is branding consulting. I love everything about branding. I would either want to do branding consulting for a marketing firm that works with different companies or getting heavily involved in one company’s brand and doing a lot of stuff for that.