From RubicOnline Podcasts, this is Senior Project: A Podcast.

Documenting the struggles, triumphs, and realities of the senior project experience at St. Paul Academy and Summit School.

I’m your host, Mimi Geller, and I will be producing this podcast as a way for students to understand Senior Project. I will interview the people I meet along the way and impart my advice as I learn more about myself, others, and possible careers I would like to pursue over the course of May.

Today I am with Maridsa Choute who is an intern at the Chicago Magazine and a graduate as of May 2017 of Illinois State University.

MG: How did you get this internship, and why did you apply at the Chicago Magazine.

MC: I got this internship actually on Twitter. Yeah, our editorial assistant who’s also our boss, Phoebe, tweeted it out and I follow a page called Writers of Color who retweeted it, and then I tweeted her back and I was just like, oh is this only for college students or is anyone open to apply and she said it was anyone. So I just sent over my resume and my letter and then I got the interview and I got a call back and I was really interested in Chicago Magazine because I like writing feature stories. So I like writing long form, really talking to people, share their stories and that’s what I like to write.

MG: And so what did you study in college?

MC: I studied journalism and Spanish.

MG: That’s like exactly what I want to study.

MC: Oh, that’s awesome.

MG: Why does journalism intrigue you, and when did it start to pique your interest?

MC:  It started to pique my interest for a while. Actually, I’ve always like been kind of in between wanting to be either a chef or a writer which is just so silly, but I chose writing instead. And instead of doing English, I decided journalism just because I like the fast pace of it. Because the news happens every day and you kind of need to be on top of it. And then my interest really peaked in high school because I actually worked for the Chicago Tribune in high school. They had a newspaper called the Mash. It was really cool and it was for just high school students. And it was a once a month type of issue where we would meet up and just basically talk through our ideas and all that, and then I was also in the newspaper in high school did the social media team. I did everything and then in college I went to do the same thing.

MG: That’s so cool. So what have you learned so far here at the Chicago Magazine?

MC:  For me, I think it’s a lot of just being more detail oriented and a lot more meticulous. I’ve learned to like really take my time with things because I’m a type of person where once I know something I get it down and I do it quickly, but with a lot of the stories that I’ve written, and the ones that I’ve corrected you really have to take your time to look at things and go over even the smallest details. So that’s just something that I’ve really appreciated and grown to learn more.

MG: What do you still hope to learn here?

MC: I really hope to learn more about improving my writing. And what I can do to get better, because I haven’t really written anything for a publication in a couple years. So I really wanted to learn how to do a really long feature story, like one of the really big ones that we always see in the magazine like the life story that we just had or something like that, where it just takes up a lot of pages but it always keeps the reader intrigued and keeps going.

MG: And lastly, why is journalism important to you and today’s society?

MC: It’s really important to me now because I mean look what’s happening with, you know, the current president that we have where media is really under attack. And a lot of people like to undermine journalism as it’s like not really important or anything like that but we’re kind of like the gatekeepers and we tell people what’s going on in the world and I think it’s really important that we have that and we’re not just sheltered in this like weird environment where we just kind of believe that news is fake, because it’s not true. And it’s important for us as a society to listen and pay attention to what’s going on around us, basically.

MG: So true. Well, thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you.