NYU internship

Today was the first day of work at NYU. It’s the first time that I’ve been to the campus. You can get there by going to West 4th St by the B train. The campus is huge. I was extremely nervous because I didn’t know what to expect. I finally found the place where I was supposed to show up after exploring the area and it was Steinhardt, the school of art and communications. The college students there greeted me and called me “the intern”. I was sort of surprised because I was the only person working there from SYEP. They all thought I was some sort of extraordinary person who got an internship. When I told them I came from SYEP, they didn’t know what it was. Oh well, more power to me. The schedule sucks though. I was told I go from 12-4 PM but it’s actually 1-5 PM. That means no lunch break and I get home around 6.

There is 1 professor and 5 college aids and one other guy named George who operates the cameras. The students are composed of 15 people. Half of them are foreign exchange students from the Dominican Republic. The other half are incoming freshmen of NYU Tisch. I seriously did not know they were freshmen. They all looked older than I am but they weren’t. The DR guys were all older than I was. One thing that really bothered me was that they all spoke Spanish frequently. The student aids all spoke fluent Spanish. So all of them communicated with ease and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

The class is held in the 5th floor. Today we learned how to operate a video camera. It isn’t a digital camera recorder, but the actual big video cameras that you see on the news. They taught us how to set up the tripod and how to white balance. I never knew that zooming in and out took so much skill because when I was doing it, it went either way to fast or out of focus really quickly. After that, we broke into groups and had to film interviews with each other. The assignment was to ask questions so we can get to know each other. After all the groups were done, we watched it. It was quite interesting because there were a lot of things I’ve never bothered to notice/appreciate that the professor pointed out during the presentations. Little things like lighting, camera angles, zooming in, zooming out, and location choices are all subtle things that the viewers tend to miss. It was pretty interesting.

The down side of this whole thing is I only get 16 hours of work per week. That’s Monday to Thursday, 4 hours per day. That’s horrible, it’s approximately gross $114 per week.