J-School students land impressive internships

By Emily Darrell
J-School Web Reporter

Hudetz

Welliver

Ritter

photos by Will Moss

Securing an internship is one of the more stressful parts of being a J-School student, and with summer – prime internship season – fast-approaching, many students are still scrambling to get in applications, while others are piling up rejection letters. Several UM journalism students can breathe easy, however, knowing they’ve already been selected for an internship, many of them at prestigious news organizations.       

Among these students are print majors Mary Hudetz, Keriann Lynch, and Ethan Robinson; photo students Tim Kupsick and Sarah Welliver; and broadcast major Emilie Ritter.     

In addition, two UM students have received Dow Jones Editing Internships for the upcoming summer.  First-year graduate student Lizz Rauf will be at The Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pa., and junior Karl Krempel will be at The Tacoma News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.  

Mary Hudetz, a first-year graduate student, was selected as a reporting intern at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, a paper that has a Sunday circulation of more than half a million.    

Hudetz had an internship last summer at the AP bureau in Sioux Falls, S. D., though her intern duties were more on the editing than the reporting side. Hudetz says she’s looking forward to interning at The Star Tribune because of its good reputation, particularly its coverage of diversity issues.    

Keriann Lynch, a senior and a news editor at the Kaimin, will be a reporting intern in her hometown this summer at The Billings Gazette, the largest paper in Montana. “It has a lot of appeals for me,” Lynch said of the Gazette. She knows the city, has relatives with whom she can stay, rent-free, and likes the idea of working for a paper that has a lot of long-term staff members who can serve as mentors.   

Sarah Welliver, a senior photo major, will be interning this summer at the Detroit Free Press.  When asked why she applied to the Free Press she answered:  “Because it’s the Detroit Free Press.” She’s looking forward to interning at a large-circulation paper with a staff of great, award-winning photographers. She’s also eager to live in a large city for the first time.   

Tim Kupsick, a senior photo major, will intern this summer at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Kupsick interned from January to August 2006 at The Bakersfield Californian, though he laments only getting to cover one forest fire in his time there. He hopes the coming summer in Bozeman will provide more fires to catch on film.    

 “I don’t want the trees to burn,” Kupsick said, “but if they do I want to cover it.”     

 Senior print major Ethan Robinson, who until last May had never been east of South Dakota, will be a copy-editing intern at The Washington Post this summer.  Last summer Robinson received a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund internship at The Los Angeles Times. 

Robinson enjoys editing stories on almost every subject but sports. “I’m good at it,” Robinson said when asked why he enjoys copy-editing. “I think when you’re good at something it kind of makes it fun.” 

Emilie Ritter, a senior broadcast major, was chosen for an internship this summer at CBS News in New York City. She does not yet know which program she’ll be working for, but her top choices are the “CBS Evening News” and “60 Minutes.” Ritter, who has worked as an anchor for two years at Montana Public Radio, said working for “60 Minutes” has always been her dream job.        

She wanted so badly to intern for CBS that she didn’t even apply for other internships: “I kind of put all my eggs in one basket.”

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