By Emilio Perez Ibarguen

Emilio Perez Ibarguen

It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that my 12 weeks covering the environment at Bridge Michigan are over, but I’d like to think that’s partly due to how busy I was chasing interesting stories all over the state.

From the very start, this internship allowed me to dive headfirst into many different policy debates, research findings and human interest stories. I became adept at learning new concepts on the fly, asking informed questions to experts and translating my reporting into a compelling narrative for readers.

One of the most challenging yet rewarding parts of my internship was going through edits with my editors at Bridge. Most stories I filed involved a consistent back-and-forth, tweaking lines for readability and forcing me to justify every detail I include in my story. While the process could be demanding at times, it pushed me to be more thoughtful in how every line in a story should help the public better understand a topic.

The most important lesson I learned from this internship was about the value of maintaining trustworthy relationships with sources. The world of environmental policy in Michigan is a relatively small one, and maintaining a strong working relationship with the lawmakers, experts and lobbyists who drive the news was essential to pushing out interesting and unique stories.

While I loved every story I worked on this summer, I’m especially proud of this look at the lax land use policies that are leaving Michigan coastal communities vulnerable to erosion, and this story on the decline of Michigan’s once-lauded bottle deposit law.

As the school year picks up once more, I’m excited to return to MSU and to The State News for my senior year.