Life of a Mentee Part 2

Welcome back, I’ve got exciting news. After a few days of playing e-mail tag, I spoke to my mentor, Joel for the first time. It was very exciting to finally make contact with the person who I had worked so hard to be able to talk to. We weren’t able to talk for long, I had to go to class, but it was a basic getting to know you talk. He actually vacations near where I live in upstate New York. While we didn’t talk much about me or my future, I wanted to get a sense of where he comes from.

He told me about going to AU and from there working at the NBC station down the road, working for the George Michael Sports Machine and produced it a few years out of college. He has covered four Olympics, sumo wrestling in Japan, and events all over the world.

Now while he is more involved in the day-to-day operations of WCBS in New York City, his experience is going to be very helpful when it comes to what I want to do. Although he’s had limited on-air experience (although he did call the longest NCAA soccer game in history, AU’s loss to UCLA in the national championship in the 1980’s) he knows what he’s doing in television, a field I’m thinking about going into.

Thanks to my internship at the Redskins and seeing television works, I’ve decided not to just solely focus on radio, and instead expand my options to include TV. Josh and I have talked about putting together a tape of my work to send out to stations across the country, and with Josh’s on-air experience combined with Joel’s knowledge of the industry, I should have a big advantage when it comes to getting a job when I graduate in May.

Well that’s it for this blog entry, I’ll be talking to Joel on Tuesday when he gets back from the Super Bowl. Joel hass gone to 14 but this will be the first one he’s just watch, not working like he usually does. I’ll talk to you then.