Start Spreading the News

I'm sitting in my boxed-up bedroom at my parents' house, ready to take off for today's treacherous twelve-hour road trip with a stranger. If the synergy of working out a ride to Chelsea is indicative of the next few months, things will be complicated and lucky. My Kalamazoo College roommate, Emily, and I were planning on riding up together, but car snafus complicated matters until my dad found out a friend-of-a-friend was driving out to New Jersey on the same morning we had planned. My first New York moment, and I haven't even left.

In New York, I'll be living in a college-sponsored townhouse in Chelsea and working on Wall Street at a radio station. The college's program allows me to forgo one quarter of classes in order to intern with a host in the arts. Because the New York Arts Program committee was gracious enough to include news media as an art form, I get this amazing opportunity. Emily is interested in radio journalism, and she landed an internship with The Moth Radio Hour. We'll be rooming together in Chelsea as well. We want both internships at once. Hopefully if there are enough hours in a day, she can sneak down to Wall Street and I can come to some readings.

Emily and I visited New York in December to interview. She bought me a milkshake at the Chelsea Market first thing on the morning I came in. We also walked around a stilted park called The High Line, SoHo, Ground Zero and Wall Street. The energy of the city infected both of us, and there was much screaming like little girls.

I was nervous to interview with the station, though I had already been offered the internship. The office is perched above the East River in a beautiful building with an art deco door. On the tenth floor, Pacifica Radio's office was buzzing with the Julian Assange leak story. My future boss, an ex-comedian, was skeptical about the authenticity of Assange's motives, but the station had just decided to read the leaks in their entirety. I'm so excited to be working in a place that decides what news people should hear and how they hear it.

It's been a fantastic break living with my family and visiting friends from high school, but Ann Arbor is getting a little too comfortable, though, and I'm ready to be leavin' today.