My personal experience
After completing my last 8-week internship with the FAW Trust before Christmas, I returned for my second term eager to get more work experience hours. After sending out a few emails, I was chosen along with a few other of my fellow sports journalism USW course mates. To begin, I was asked to write about something so that they could get a sense of how I wrote before providing me with a username and password for my prost wordpress login.
I chose to do a match preview for the club world cup final between my favourite team Chelsea, and Palmeiras. Soon Chris Stonage and Steve Clare who were both supervising the placement got back to me saying they liked my piece and they were happy to have me on board. In the following weeks I went on to write stories varying from player features to news pieces, I was starting to get into the groove of writing for prost and on a weekly basis also which I think was great for my work ethic and to keep me focused.
The feedback I received and my responses to it
I’ve always found that encouragement and praise work for me. Whether it’s football, university study, or any other hobby. In this situation, the response was really positive. Every article I put out was met with appreciation from Steve and Chris, which further boosted my confidence and fueled my desire to impress. I soon stopped waiting for things to be allocated to me and began taking the initiative on my own, offering story ideas and running them by my supervisors. Overall, the initial response was positive, and I was delighted to continue writing for them.
The skills I learnt and further developed
One thing that was interesting about this placement was that it was entirely done online, but not via Zoom or email. We used an app called Slack on our phones for all communication, which helped me further develop my team building skills because there were always chats going on daily about story ideas or tasks being assigned, so there was always some form of consistent communication throughout the placement, which I really liked because it always kept you on track with the work you needed to do. It goes without saying that it helped enhance my writing because I was writing on a range of various topics and in varying lengths, so it wasn’t always the same.
Oscar's Blog 