What I Learned From My Radio Station Internship

This blog was written by Intern Queen Campus Ambassador, Saya Arakawa, who attends University of Central Florida in Orlando. Saya loves internships and is excited to share her experiences!

This past summer I interned at 96.5 WHTQ Classic Rock radio station.  This was my first internship ever and I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know if I was just going to be the “coffee girl” or just the intern that scans papers all day. However, I went in there with open arms and an open mind on the whole experience.

A majority of my internship hours were spent at “remotes”, a paid/unpaid large or small-scale event where our station goes out and promotes for different companies. They would consist of going to a variety of places such as car dealerships, restaurants, bars, bike shops, car shows, and basically anything that aimed towards our listener’s interests. We would go out to the spot and set up our tent, tables, and giveaways.  The remote would only last for a couple of hours and during those hours we had to connect with people and take pictures of people enjoying their time at the event that we were at.  We would give away t-shirts, tickets to shows, koozies, stickers, and other free giveaways.  The remotes were a lot of fun because we got to do hands-on activities with people and not just sitting behind a desk putting information into a word document. I felt that doing the actual hands-on activities gave me a real life feel of what it is like working for a radio station., which is what I enjoyed. Of course, I still did a few hours in the office where I would put information into spreadsheets, make calls to winners of prizes, and prepared sales and promotional proposals, but I enjoyed the mixture of both hands-on activities, as well as, the office hours.

If anyone is interested in doing an internship for a radio station I highly advise it.  It was an awesome experience and I learned a lot from it. After working as an intern for the radio station, I was offered to work on their promotions team for the fall. So, it really is true! If you intern for a company there is a good possibility that you could work for them in the future. Don’t take internships for granted! You can learn so much and it will help you out in the long run!