So currently I’m working on two projects for U.S. News:
1. A end of the summer trivia quiz. Basically, we’re putting together a bunch of puzzles and other questions about summer events. Kind of neat. I’ll probably have to build the online portion of it. Unfortunately my coding skills when it comes to that kind of web site is pretty limited, so I’ll have to get better at that soon. I will get to write a few of those questions as well. The editor has seen that people have been getting into Sudoku (which I posted on a while ago), I’m now in charge of coming up with the math questions. Sudoku, though while a numbers game, isn’t necessarily a math game. We’ll see how well I can do this; my math skills have been slowly decaying over the years. I’m confident I can recover, but I was never that good at math puzzles in general though. It maybe tough for me to find and make up good ones. We’ll see.
2. Getting a hold of celebrities to do a weekly feature on people and their college lives. Basically I call their publicist or agents, get their emails, and then email them the basic pitch of the feature. Some get back to be rather quickly and yes, but most of them don’t get back to you. And of course there are the few who get back to you and decline and sometimes do it in a mean way (a la Kathy Bates publicist). Even fewer are the people who email you back themselves (Mark Cuban for example). It’s kind of a cool assignment, but can be a bit frustrating at times. Some of the people I’ve called are incredibly helpful, but unfortunately they tend to be for the lower level celebrities.
BTW, here are some interesting facts about some of the people I had to contact:
A. Conan O’ Brien went to Harvard (unfortunately, he turned us down).
B. Danica McKellar (Winnie from the Wonder Years) apparently co-authored a math theorem with a professor and another undergrad. So she has a math theorem named after her.
So yeah, I can say I’ve been helping out the company a lot now.
oh my gosh i totally knew about b) bc my old tutor tony used to go to school with her. she majored in math and supposed to be super smart. she also wears super thick glasses in real life. and aw conan!!!!
is us news fun? i would totally love to work for a magazine in the future. tell meeeee =D and im gonna be in washington dc next weekend!
US News and DC
I think it depends on what you like. You probably be most interested in working with the culture section. They are the ones who talk about TV, movies, books, and stuff and they are pretty cool. They get sent a lot of free stuff (though every department does, but culture more so) in hopes that we would give people publicity (FOX tends to do this a lot), plus they especially like getting articles from the interns, because they generally know more about what’s going on. You obviously won’t feel as though you’re contributing that much on the magazine, but you’ll defiently be able to get stuff on the website.
The web team, where I work, is a lot of fun people to work with, but the work isn’t as much fun (though you could end up with my assignment and call celebrities, which I think you might enjoy more than me).
The company throws parties every now and then, which is neat and everyone tends to be pretty friendly.
Cool, feel free to look me up if you need a guide or anything. Where are you staying?