I got my first real assignment at the Dallas Morning News (DMN) this summer on my third day as an intern. I had to write two stories from the CONCACAF Gold Cup games that night, with my deadline only 90 minutes after the final whistle.
I was nervous. I wanted this internship to help me decide what career path to take after college, and I desperately wanted the answer to be sports journalism.
Two and a half hours before kickoff, I made it to AT&T Stadium. I ate press box fajitas and got to work prepping for the game. I learned as much as I could about the four teams playing and even wrote some copy to help speed up my process.
As soon as the game started, my nerves went away. I loved watching soccer, and I started to feel like I belonged. I had most of my story done by the final whistle, just needing to add quotes from the postgame presser.
I was feeling good as I took the elevator down to the press conference, following all the other people in business clothes who were holding pens and paper. However, once the coaches walked in and started to speak, I realized there was something I hadn’t accounted for. Since both of that night's winning teams had coaches from Spanish-speaking countries, the press conferences were in Spanish.
I speak Spanish, but I’m not a native speaker. So, the second I heard the coach speak in Spanish, my whole brain glitched. I was going to have to pay 10 times more attention to this press conference than I had anticipated. By the time I finished talking to coaches and players, I was exhausted.
Despite all my nerves and having to translate quotes, I turned in my stories right on time. As soon as I got home, I instantly fell asleep.
I not only survived, but I loved it. The games were fun to watch, and the deadline was exhilarating, but if I had told myself in March what my first assignment would look like this summer, I might have cried.
I’ve always known I wanted to be a journalist, but with the media landscape constantly changing, I chose to come to Rice and pursue a degree in Sport Management and Social Policy Analysis instead of journalism.
I knew I could keep up my writing skills with the student newspaper at Rice, and that there were no better schools to learn about the industries I wanted to cover. I made the right choice, but at the beginning of the summer, I still wasn’t sure what to expect from a newsroom internship.
Luckily, my internship was through the Sports Journalism Institute (SJI), and by the time my first day rolled around, I was nervous, but I was prepared. The Sports Journalism Institute is a training and internship program for underrepresented college students working toward a career in sports journalism. There are more than 375 SJI alumni, and I met many of them this summer during my internship.
SJI provides students with mentorship, a weeklong boot camp with travel and lodging, and an internship in sports journalism. However, this summer I gained so much more than that.
After training with SJI, I was ready for anything the DMN threw my way. I covered Paige Bueckers in her rookie season with the Dallas Wings, the Dallas Cowboys before they traded Micah Parsons, and Tiger Woods visiting Dallas for his son Charlie’s golf tournament. I even spent one week on the breaking news desk, where I covered a Dallas Area Rapid Transit train fire.
My hours were the opposite of normal, and it was my first summer away from Houston, but I had never felt so at home as when I was covering sports in Dallas this summer.
Kathleen Ortiz, a senior from Kingwood, Texas, is studying Social Policy Analysis and Sport Management with a concentration in Sport Law.