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Internship at Paris Newsweek Clarifies Student's Career Goals

<<<Insiya Rasawala '99 (center) takes a café break from her internship at Newsweek's Paris bureau with her supervisor, bureau chief and Middle East editor Christopher Dickey, and sister intern Valerie Lincy, a Smith College alumna.

Junior Insiya Rasawala shared the following impressions from her summer internship.

I knew exactly what I wanted from the summer: something worthwhile, exciting, interesting, educational, and fun that would contribute to the world and to my future development. Not too much to ask ... A wealth of summer experiences offered me all those things, including an internship with Newsweek International in France.

I was one of two interns at the Paris bureau, a dynamic place where we had to be on top of the news and ferret out news possibilities before anyone else got a whiff of them. The atmosphere was charged ... well, most of the time. (There were days when my most exciting tasks entailed clipping and filing newspaper articles.)

But I also got to do what I really wanted: write. I interviewed people, in French, for articles, which was quite intimidating at first. One interesting story I worked on was about the state of the Internet in France, a country still wary of embracing this communications system. They even debate what it should be called: l'internet or just Internet. The French are not happy about creating new French words for the vocabulary the Internet requires. This June, they announced a new word for email: mel, an abbreviation for message electronique. In spite of thinking that it was ridiculous, I began to have a much clearer sense of the value the French place on their language and how closely they monitor and guard it.

I also researched articles, learnt what lies behind a two-page newsmagazine story, wrote and rewrote paragraph after paragraph, and glowed with pride when a little piece that I helped write made it into an edition. My speaking skills in French improved, my understanding of journalism increased, and I met some inspiring people along the way. Journalism is now high on my list of career choices, something that I had only thought about abstractly before this summer.