For many students, shipping off to an unfamiliar city alone for a summer sounds like a daunting prospect. For junior Rebecca Fitzgerald, however, it sounds like an adventure.
Fitzgerald landed an internship in the sports department of The Kansas City Star in Missouri, an impressive experience to add to her already long list of journalistic accomplishments.
For nine weeks, Fitzgerald will receive instruction from Poynter Institute faculty and report in the city home to the Kansas City Royals, the Kansas City Chiefs and Sporting Kansas City.
Though she knows no one in the area going into the experience, she said she is excited to see what the city has in store for her.
Fitzgerald said her taste for print journalism developed in a class on the subject during her senior year of high school in Guilderland, N.Y.
“I completed really interesting projects [and] some investigative pieces on the sports department at Guilderland High School,” she said. “I found it fun and it just seemed natural for me.”
She’s come a long way since that high school journalism course, currently gearing up to take on the position of Managing Editor at The Lamron for the 2013-14 school year.
Fitzgerald began her career at The Lamron during her first semester in Geneseo, taking on the position of assistant copy editor for the sports section. She said she gravitated toward sports writing due to her love of and familiarity with the subject.
An athlete herself, she grew up playing softball, starting at 4 years old and stopping at 19 after choosing to focus on other extracurricular goals.
During her sophomore year, Fitzgerald committed herself academically to journalism, declaring a communication major on top of her secondary Spanish major and scoring a summer internship with the Times Union. There, she reported on the Tri-City ValleyCats, a minor league baseball team based in Troy, N.Y.
“I spent six weeks or so going to those baseball games and writing, meeting the coaches, meeting the players,” she said.
Fitzgerald said she was glad to have taken that internship opportunity, which gave her the chance to experiment with her sports writing.
“I think that working for the Times Union, in addition to my Lamron experience, just gave me a new perspective on how I want to write and what things I like and don’t like about certain types of articles and how I want to approach writing about sports,” she said.
Fitzgerald returned to Geneseo as sports editor for The Lamron, a position she said has been different from any leadership role she has had.
After learning to balance the unique backgrounds, skills and goals of her team of sports writers, Fitzgerald said she is ready to take on a larger role in the paper.
“What I liked about the managing editor position is the idea of being more involved in … the whole paper, not just the sports section,” she said. “I would just like to help shape The Lamron, and see it grow and improve as it has over the last few years. I like new challenges; I like mixing it up. I saw a good opportunity and I decided to go for it.”
Considering her future career, Fitzgerald said she wants to be a professional print journalist and is willing to move anywhere to make that dream happen. Looking back, she remarked that she would not have expected this field to become her passion.
“When I was younger, I never would have expected myself to become a journalist,” she said. “I was definitely quieter and sort of reserved and I liked safe things. And journalism is basically the opposite of that. You have to be forward; you have to get out of your comfort zone sometimes to approach sources that don’t want to be talked to and out of all of that, I love the thrill that is associated with journalism as well. It didn’t really hit me until senior year of high school that this could be my thing, this could become my calling.”