Moving Up From Being the Water Girl

The first day of my internship was probably one of the most nerve wracking days of my life. This was the first time I would actually be working in a television studio hands on. All I thought about that day was, “What if I mess up?” “What if this isn’t the right job for me?” “What if I hate it?” I walked into the studio and was welcomed by the friendly staff at WBBZ-TV. I sat down at my supervisor’s desk opposite him and he immediately started giving me a list of things to do. A lot of it was social media related so I wasn’t too worried about it until I was just about to press “post” but paused and decided to reread it for the 100th time just to make sure everything was spelled right and sounded good. At first social media was all that I did – promoting shows and interacting with the viewers. I went to a filming of their game show, “Bragging Rights!” and while I was there I mostly just made sure the contestants had water and that they left with their prize. Then the “Robert Woods Show” was about to go live on Monday evening and I had the responsibility of checking in the audience members and helping the crew during the entire show. My jobs that night included asking everyone if they wanted to ask Robert a question or if they wanted to compete in our Hotshot competition. I made sure Tim the camera man didn’t trip on anything while he was walking around and filming and that the contestant competing in the Hotshot was where they needed to be at the right time. After a stressful live production with many audio and visual glitches, my supervisor came out from the control room and told us that we have to do the entire thing again for tape. He said, “Sorry guys, that’s Hollywood.” Monday was long and overwhelming but ultimately I was able to see how a TV studio actually operated and what went in to producing a live TV show. I learned that no matter what, we are all still human dealing with technology that doesn’t always work and there will be mistakes made no matter what. When we were all done and almost finished packing up the studio I thought back to my first day and realized that this is the right job for me and I definitely don’t hate it.