O/B Week Thirteen

You can tell it's been a busy few weeks, since I forgot to post last week! Things are rolling forward and with graduation on the horizon, deadlines are becoming more and more real. I have ten thousand things to do before May first and have started back up at my airline position, so I'm just continuously trying to check things off the list and keep my head above water.

Surprisingly, the internship feels almost like a break at this point. Don't get me wrong-- I still have an immense amount of work to do for O/B, but since the Cast copy-editing and fact-checking (the worst part of this gig) is now done, I'm just focusing on writing for now-- which is kind of nice! As I mentioned from the first week in April, Mike and Tuck assigned me a feature article for the summer edition on catch and release fishing. I have to admit, I was overwhelmed by the idea of the piece. Mike felt really strongly that we had something to prove by publishing it, so there was a lot of pressure on me to find the right kind of content. Just for background, they wanted me to look at the number of licenses sold in the state of Montana in a fishing year (there are more than FIVE types), and somehow calculate based off a now-outdated fishing pressure survey how many fish are likely to be dying as a result of catch and release, and decide whether it would be more ecologically beneficial to just operate on a bag limit premise. I'm sure you can see how quickly that becomes complicated, and just as easily inaccurate. I would have had a little less than three weeks to complete the research, conduct interviews, and write up the damn thing. 

Thank goodness they came to their senses. I'm not going to say that Mike and Tuck were crazy in thinking that I could reasonably get a project of that size done in that kind of time frame (not to mention the overlap with finals week and the completion of my capstone paper), but at the very least it was an unrealistic assignment. They tabled it for the fall issue and gave me a few other articles to write for summer, which has been the focus of most of my energy lately. 

I was assigned a small news and notes piece on the GLVT's guided walks, a single page spread covering the A.R.T. utility box project, a segmented article on trail food, including foraged and homemade foods, an energy bar comparison, and a profile of a few different energy goos. I am in charge of the Outlook again for the summer edition (yay!), and wrote two gear reviews for a pair of mountain biking gloves and my Scarpa trail running shoes.  It doesn't feel like as much writing as the spring edition did-- but then again, I'm settled in now and feel much more confident in the kind of work I'm doing. 

The most difficult part of the magazine right now is how hectic things feel. All the deadlines are culminating at the end of this internship, and though Mike has significantly pared down my to-do list here, I still find myself concerned with the amount of smaller, menial things I need to find the time to get done. I have several spreadsheets to work on by the first of the month as well as an intern-wide coupon contest , and the deadline for the summer edition is the 27th, Since we just got things sorted out with Cast, and the summer issue follows so closely there's really no break at all. 

Did I mention ANOTHER intern quit this week? Our video intern, Morgan left us since her work was sub-par. Only two more weeks to go.