This week I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked due to some family things which preoccupied most of my time. I did schedule an editing meeting with Kiera on Tuesday where she work shopped my blue print article, and just like I thought it needed some trimming. I also had the rescheduled meeting from last week with my supervisor planned for that day, but I guess she wasn’t made aware of the appointment and I had to leave before she arrived.

This week I interview Sonya Hollins. I spent an hour with her taking notes and recording her responses to my questions. I haven’t listened to the recording, which I need to do fairly soon, just to make sure I got everything. I went down town to meet with her and I’m so glad she was able to drive to meet me. If I had to go to Kalamazoo, I would have had to rearrange some things and I didn’t want to put it off for much longer. The interview went really went, and I feel confident enough to start working on the article. My only problem now is planning a design scheme for the photo essay portion.

Part of my internship includes writing for the organization’s blog every week. It’s really hard to come up with something new that people actually might want to read, especially when not much is happening at the organization.

I've spent some time looking for job postings for a travel writer. There aren't many out there. But while I was looking I found quite a few postings for bloggers. I had an Aha! moment.

This week was busy, but I also found the work I accomplished to be more fulfilling than the stuff I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. I think a lot of that has to do with having to spend much less time scheduling interviews with people and worrying about staying coordinated, and spending much more time just getting down to writing.

This week has been an exercise in tedium. I’m still revising the oral history interview for Sonya Hollins, which was roughly an hour and 15 minutes long. I’m ten pages into my revision. I met with my internship coordinator to talk about my progress. I told her I’ve contacted Sonya Hollins and plan to meet with her next week for a follow up interview. I’ve had a little scheduling mistake. I originally told her one time and forgot I had something to do during that time, so I have to rearrange the time and day. She hasn’t responded to my email yet.

I’m finishing up the organization description and the project description, the two main parts of the letter of inquiry for the Mott grant. I proofread and changed them a million times before I finally had to stop. That’s the thing about writing… it’s never perfect. There are always improvements you could make or ways to re-word something so it sounds just a little bit better. I have to realize that something I write is never going to be perfect, and work on determining when it’s good enough. That’s what’s hard… figuring out what’s good enough.

It has been a wild couple of weeks. Things would have been smooth sailing if the unexpected project hadn't taken a week out of my life. Regardless, tomorrow I will arrive at Eberhard Center around 7:15 am, get the registration table set up, do a quick training session with the student volunteers, and spend most of my day working at the Math in Action Conference.

This week I have more interviews to do for an article expansion about study areas and about off campus places to eat. This time it shouldn’t be as time consuming as it was last week, as there isn’t anything to do in the way of scheduling, the magazines photographer and I are just going to approach people at random to get their input. The only catch is that there needs to be a sampling from both main campuses.

This is my busy season at work. It starts around September and runs through April, but January through March is the busiest. That means I am under a lot of stress at this time. And I usually roll with it fairly well.