Tommy Collison

I recently finished working with The Sunday Business Post on a 3 week internship in their main offices in Harcourt St., in Dublin. Despite the long (14 hours) days and the four-and-a-half hours I’d spend on a train each day, I enjoyed every single minute of it.

The opportunity came about when their tech guru, Adrian Weckler interviewed me for the Young Scientist Exhibition (link). After the interview, we talked for a while, and he asked me what I wanted to do, career-wise. I responded that my intentions lay in journalism, with a possible lean towards tech-related stories. He told me that the Post do internships sometimes over the summer, and to contact him later on in the year (this was only January). I did so in May as a distraction from studying for exams and we organized dates in August.

Words have a hard time in expressing how much sheer value and enjoyment I got out of it all. I’d be in the office from 10.30 to 4.20 most days and I’d spend that day working and learning in equal measure and Adrian was a great ‘boss’ (for the want of a better word) to work with (as opposed to ‘under’, that’s not the sort of environment the Post works in; you’re working with these people, not ‘under’ or ‘for).

I felt like a fully-fledged worker while there, submitting articles (!) under my own name, watching others at work, attending their weekly planning meetings and even accompanying a journalist there to a press-conference held by Paddy Power in the Merrion Hotel. ‘I think this would make a good article…’ was the beginning of most of our discussions about content and I was even asked if I’d be willing to contribute a piece about teens and back-to-school tech (read here – I mention iStudiez in that article, watch this space for a full review once I’m back in school!). For a 2nd year student doing an unpaid internship to figure out if this is the career he wants, being asked was a humbling experience and a great opportunity.

Isn’t that what you want, though? 3 weeks isn’t a long time in the scheme of things and I want to learn the most about the hands-on work of a journalist as possible. Thankfully, Adrian, Dick, Mark, Cliff, Richard and Emma and others gave me that. I had a blast.

Thank you