By Isabella Figueroa Nogueira

Isabella Figueroa Nogueira

Isabella Figueroa Nogueira was an environmental reporting intern at Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit statewide news service, in collaboration with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

My summer internship as an environmental reporter at Bridge Michigan gave me a better understanding of what it means to work as a professional journalist. Going into the internship, I was excited to report on environmental issues across Michigan and gain experience in a newsroom outside of college journalism.

By the end of the summer, I felt that I had grown not only as a reporter, but also in my confidence, independence and understanding of what kind of journalist I want to become.

One of the best parts of the internship was getting to work on environmental stories that mattered to communities across Michigan. I was able to report on issues ranging from data centers and their environmental impacts to wildlife, water and other environmental policy issues. I especially enjoyed the opportunity to talk with people directly affected by the issues I was covering. Being able to interview sources, attend meetings and take information from documents and turn it into a story made the work feel meaningful.

I also appreciated how much independence I was given. I was trusted to pitch stories, reach out to sources, conduct interviews and work through reporting on my own. At first, that independence could be intimidating. In life, there are always deadlines and assignments.

However, working in a professional newsroom requires you to manage your own time and constantly prioritize tasks, even as the deadlines keep coming. I had to learn how to stay organized and hold myself accountable without always having someone checking in on me.

One of the biggest challenges I faced was motivation. Working largely on my own meant that there were days when it was difficult to get myself into a productive mindset, especially when a story was taking longer than expected or I was waiting for sources to respond.

Reporting can involve a lot of emails, phone calls, research and dead ends before there is anything to show for it. I learned that motivation does not always come before doing the work. Sometimes, I had to start making the calls, reading the documents or writing the first few paragraphs before I felt motivated. That was an important lesson for me because journalism requires consistency, even when a story is not moving as quickly as I want it to.

Another part of the experience was learning how to balance a full-time internship with the rest of my life. Working 40 hours a week gave me a better idea of what a career in journalism could actually look like. It was an adjustment to have so much of my week centered around reporting, especially when a story followed me home mentally even after I was done working for the day.

At the same time, I learned how important it is to give myself time to step away from the work. Having a routine outside of the newsroom helped me come back to my stories with a clearer mind and reminded me that being a good journalist does not mean thinking about journalism every second of the day.

Overall, my time at Bridge Michigan helped me become a more independent and confident reporter. I learned that journalism is not always exciting interviews and finished stories. A lot of it is persistence, organization, rejection and figuring things out on your own. While there were moments when I struggled with motivation or felt unsure of myself, those challenges made the experience more valuable. I am leaving the internship with a better understanding of both the kind of reporter I want to be and the work it will take to get there.