We know you do!
We are seeking interns for the Fall 2012 semester. Candidates must:
- Receive college or grad school credit for the semester
- Be at least a sophomore in college
- Be able to commute to New York City at least 3 times/week
Candidates should have an interest in politics and journalism. Political dorks and policy wonks are welcome (and encouraged!) to apply. If you have a knack for research, we’ll probably get along well.
Please email us your resume by attaching it as a Word document. Also, be sure to copy + paste the resume into the email body.
Include a short paragraph (fewer than 150 words) about why you are interested in interning for the show.
Deadline: Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Email: rachel@msnbc.com
Leave a Comment:
I wish I could make it to NY three times a week. The work you do is a cut above almost all the other journalism I see out there. It regularly elevates my thinking and informs my perspective, and even challenges me to be more keen in my own approach to life. Thank you for the great work that you do.
Gee whiz, I want to intern. :-( Guess I will just have to pass this on to the students...not fair.
I can research, do computer anything and love politics. Can I do it fro home??
Internship is wasted on the youth :-)
PS I drive a red pick up, points???
What if I am a freshmen in college?
Then before you apply, you might want to learn how to spell "freshman" :-)
I Love that Photo "Maddownaut"
I live in Spokane and am 54, a computer technician working with a school district... but I still want to do it. *sigh*
I made this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0TnqUlB4Gg
Would love to visit. I think you're amazing but I'm not qualified to wipe down your desk after the show. Keep up the crusade and thank you for all you do. Tell Lawrence Hi and wish Ed's wife the best.
Oh, to be young and free again! This 48 year old father of 3 is envious of the eventual intern. You guys do some incredible work there; my wife and I, and our 12 year old, enjoy it each night. We could do without the prison shows, though. lol
Good luck on your search!
I'm 58, laid-off web geek, former newspaper photographer; also a musician, private pilot (retired), marksman and all-around bullsh*t detector. Think you can use someone like me?
BTW, I LIKE prison night. Reminds me of why I don't commit crimes. >:-O
I'm a freelance writer, college was many decades earlier, and I'd like to intern. Ah well.
I would do this in a minute but I'm retired and 62 but I'm going to try to recruit a relative so I can visit them on the job. What a wonderful opportunity!
College was many years ago for me too! But my degree was in Communications so if you can't find any one qualified you might look for a retired person who is very available. I can get to NY . This is a great opportunity for anyone.
Discriminating against us old college drop outs? Unfair! I would so have loved to see your staff as they sniff out the stories.
Just as well though since A) I have never been that fer north and B) I hate crowds.
I'd give my eye teeth, and yes I do still have them at 64, to do this internship. Pity, I am at the end of my road.....and so much wiser for it.
Please note that this bold attempt by Rachel to make Newt Gingrich envious is a tad too much! Of course in truth Newt upon siding with Bachman has shot well past his lunar phase and was last seen exiting the known universe.
By the way why is your head almost as big as the Earth? Is it all a matter of perspective?
You do realize you have just given the nuts who claim we never went to the moon a huge talking point?
Just a quick request: will you all at TRMS let us know roughly how many applications you receive for this plum of an opportunity? Just would like to know how many lucky (young, qualified, sensible, wonky) souls go for it!
Sigh. I'm younger than NiteOwlett, but not by much. My Ph.D. is only 28 years old, though. Afraid I couldn't afford to commute anywhere 3X/week.
Cheers!
That's an interesting idea. We'll take it under consideration.
Looks like you have an untapped resource here just begging to be used. Please add my name to the list of people that live too far away to come into the city weekly and graduated from college half a life ago but would love to become a part of this organization on some level.
Just sent in my application! Looking forward to seeing what happens, and good luck to everyone else applying. This is an exciting opportunity.
If I wasn't already a chiropractor and psychotherapist I'd LOVE to intern! I love, love, love the work you guys do and I read and see nearly everything you do. I want a third career!
I'm still an undergrad going into my last year, but I'd really like to help with the show. Is it possible to be an intern at a distance? Unless you guys can pay the airfare for my commute from San Juan, PR to New York, I can't apply.
I have to say. You look damn cute in the space suit Rachel. "Fly me to the moon..."
I wish I could do this too...I'm 29 and I'm still too old.... but I stay optimistic
Internships, apprenticeships. There have to be ways for new entrants into the job market to get in the door. I get that, believe in it.
But look at all the middle-aged talent volunteering above. Why do interns get to have all the fun? Isn't that age discrimination?
The country is full of wonderfully talented middle aged people-- look at all the talents and skills some people have, and are deeply, vastly, under-employed, using just a small fragment of their skills and training and competencies in their current jobs, if they even have a current job.
There's a vast alternate talent economy, online. I found it during my Xena research in the 1990s. I found all kinds of people building worlds and communities online that let them own in their non-work lives, their creativity, their database- and application-building skills, their artwork, writing, argumentation, and all that comes from lives spent actively reading and thinking and making.
Their jobs, their employers, some of them really BELIEVE these hidden landmines of talent aren't actually scattered across the landscape, like the Jonathan Pryce character in the film "Brazil." They think these kinds of employees really are as thinly-qualified as the bonehead colleague sitting next to them, because so little is asked of their real abilities.
There's something SO empowering in knowing that your employer doesn't get to own your best work. That that novel is advancing a chapter at a time, after you get off work.
Nothing is anything close to a meritocracy, anywhere. It's all a crap shoot, or karma, where one ends up, and why. Luck of the draw.
Some doors open. Others stay permanently closed. One can explore this idea. OK, so the front door is closed, that road to the left is blocked.
It's sort of like being a point guard against a zone defense, and you want to pass the ball inside. Well, that just isn't going to go. Drive, pick, pass, it just won't go. So what do you do? Work it around the horn, around the outside, faster and faster, get the defense to overshift, and there! There's that opening.
The beauty of life and learning and talent is that YOU GET TO OWN your own talents, your own skills. Emily Dickinson wrote "Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man." EVERYTHING we do doesn't have to be packaged for a line on the resume, or a form of personal branding, striving, or advancement, something to please other people, to earn you some modicum of approval from a management structure that has been deliberately thinned out and dumbed down from this turf war or that turf war (because enemies and threats are always the first ones laid off in the restructuring that comes after).
You get to tinker and build brilliant things in your garage. Write 1775 poems and tell your sister to burn them after you die. Have your own ideas, theories, plans for world domination. We get to just be. I can't tell you how hard that is for me, most days. But I get to be my own workaholic, on my own time.
Radical idea, eh? DeCerteau has a wonderful book that studies how people do this, "The Practice of Everyday Life." I wonder if I would even be able to embrace this outlook if I hadn't read it (I wrote about it some here, but it is deep into the article where you get to the DeCerteau bits)
Some folks get to win the lottery, and that's what it is, a lottery.
Like how only people from Ivy League schools get to work in "publishing" in NYC (now even fewer get to work in that, since the publishing industry is collapsing).
Like how parents actually BUY their kids internships, paying high profile employers to give their kid a "job," some internships, wealthy parents. I've worked side-by-side with some of these people, with their famous last names. They sure do get promoted quickly in some organizations too. Wonder how that happens.
You just gotta be fatalistic about it. Some days the bear will eat you. Some days you'll eat the bear.
I'm not really a fatalist or a determinist, not at all. I've just observed as I've grown long in tooth, that that is how things really work, in spite of the best laid plans.
Salon article about Jonah Lehrer made me think more about some of the issues I raised in the odd ramble about youth and age and talent I posted above (unlinked bold emphasis below is mine):
At least the New Yorker's list of 20 Writers Under 40 is evenly balanced between men and women. But what is the obsession with youth and (relative) precociousness? (Well, can you really call someone in their late 30s precocious?)
It happens with young male tenure track professors too, with the old bulls of the department only too eager to embrace and mentor them, give them a leg up. And they all show up with ambitious wives to help throw the requisite faculty parties you need to help seal your tenure bid. George Segal in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" embodies this role to a T, at least at the beginning.
The rest of us can stew in our MacArthur grant envy, wondering what those emerging talents supposedly have that trumps our hard-won experience and knowledge. Oh yeah, the demo. They magically deliver the demo for those who live and die by it.
They also can magically write at the sixth grade reading level TV-land requires, because young people have read so little long form writing these days.
When I was doing my time in writing workshops (I was much younger then), one of my professors sighed the lament of the mid-list writer who is well past his first and second book, and will never see his title placed at the front of the bookstore (this was before the Internet and Amazon and the Long Tail).
I sort of giggled at his angst at the time (I was all of 25). He'd had his run, I thought. He'd published in the days when Esquire would pay $5K for a short story. This was a meritocracy, of sorts, with schmoozing (think Mad Men).
Youth is cruel. And clueless. They have the boldness of not knowing what they don't know. Just Donald Rumsfeld's type.
Ahh, like so many of the others on here, I too am too old for this internship and live in Texas, so commuting is not an option, unless of course you want a lawyer via Skype or some other social media. It could be fascinating to bring many of us "remote/post intern people" together to work with you and to fly up 1-2x over the period. And for the record, I'm hooked on your show, a criminal defense lawyer, and shockingly one of the few out gay attorneys in Austin! I think the unique diversity that we could all bring to the table would be amazing ... maybe one "Best New Thing in the World"? :-)
Well, if you ever need the services of a 50 year old medical cannabis activist in NoCal...I'll be around, lol.
Lucky kids...
Just a tip from a college student: You might want to let us know more than 2 weeks before the start of the fall semester (typically mid august). we are busy right now registering for classes, buying books, getting financial aid, etc.
I can't tell you how many internships and co-ops I've applied for that the company waits until 10 days or less before the semester to start vetting candidates. I've gotten calls after the semester has started. Can't be in two places at once.
But hey, maybe that's the way it works, only "good interns" will drop everything for the opportunity.