Wesleyan Students Build Career Experience at Top Media Outlets

This summer, students embarked on internships at notable literary publications, news media outlets, and publishers and literary agencies through Wesleyan’s Anne Greene Internships in the Literary Arts, which launched earlier this year.

“The Shapiro Center is thrilled to offer these internships to students,” said Zachary Fine, interim director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. “It’s hard to think of another university in America right now providing undergraduates with better opportunities for jobs in media and book publishing. We hope that our curriculum at the Shapiro—with course offerings on long-form narrative journalism, criticism, podcasting, translation, and much else—will not only provide students with a strong foundation in creative and critical writing but also prepare them for a range of possible career paths.”

Janhavi Munde ’27 came to Wesleyan as an international student from India three years ago and has made the most of her time in Middletown. She has worked for The Wesleyan Argus since her first year, advancing to editor-in-chief, and also works as a teaching assistant in the Center for Prison Education.

Munde was looking to work in a new publishing environment after interning at a news outlet last summer, so she spent this past summer as an editorial intern at The New York Review of Books (NYRB) in Manhattan. “It wasn't a newsroom, and it was a more curated style of writing and criticism,” she said. “Although journalism is my passion, I hadn't had any experience in magazine writing, or done work outside of Connecticut, so that's why this appealed to me,” Munde said.

Much of Munde’s responsibilities are split between administrative tasks, like sorting the dozens of book submissions the publication receives each week by mail, corresponding with publicists, and content production work like editing and fact checking. “Before this internship, I was really only familiar with the magazine’s print and publishing arm—but being able to copy edit and fact-check some of the pieces published on the NYRB website really acquainted me with the digital front of the publication, and exposed me to how literary magazines operate online,” Munde said.

Munde majors in the College of Letters and government, which has defined her as a reader and has helped her read texts on their own terms, instead of trying to contextualize or reference them in comparison to other writing. She said reading this way helped her prepare for a long-form interview story on recent NYRB contributor and Iranian historian Nahid Siamdoust in the magazine’s Brief Encounters section. She also said her experience leading the Argus, where she oversaw more than 50 people, has directly translated to her corresponding with authors and editors daily at NYRB.

Phoebe Mulder ’27, an American Studies major, interned at Slate over the summer to work on the Decoder Ring podcast, a show which examines cultural phenomena like tracking our obsession with suntanning. For her internship, she does behind-the-scenes work, like reviewing archival footage for episode research and writing interview prep sheets, and some production as well. She produced two episodes of Decoder Rings Back—a special monthly episode where the podcast answers an audience question on such topics as collectible souvenir spoons and mock car crashes.

Mulder said she’d like to pursue a career in audio journalism and narrative nonfiction, sparked in part by this internship. At Wesleyan, she runs The Sloth, a storytelling collective, and taken podcasting courses through the Shapiro Center. “I took some narrative nonfiction classes that were very research heavy and that's been really helpful,” Mulder said. “[The podcast’s] whole thing is they're trying to tackle topics that haven't been done before, which means that it's often harder to find the information that they're looking for. I feel like Wesleyan has been helpful in applying research skills in a big way.”

The ability to research has been crucial, Mulder said, since pitching ideas for the podcast is an important step in the process. She said she’s learned how much work goes into suggesting an idea for coverage. Not only does an idea have to have compelling narrative arc, but it also must fit the format of the show. “Learning how to do research and look for historical stories or cultural phenomena that are going to translate into the format of the podcast has been the most challenging, but also the most interesting thing,” she said.

Tran Chau ’27, an East Asian Studies major, was a reporting intern for CT Mirror this summer, covering local government, housing, transportation, and immigration. She said the experience made her more interested in state politics and has taught her about the importance of information accessibility. “I definitely really enjoy writing about state politics and how these different policies are affecting these communities,” said Chau after referencing a story she wrote on a tenant union’s efforts to improve their housing conditions.

Chau first engaged with journalism through a data journalism class last fall. Through this course, she learned how to use data and interviews with sources to tell a story. She has also done academic research on Vietnamese patriotism as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow. She taken skills learned from each of those experiences and applied them at her internships, she said.

“The academic writing is so different, but I do feel like there's some overlapping aspects,” Chau said. “For academic research you have to do a literature review where you're putting these scholars into conversation. Here I felt I was doing the same thing, where I'm interviewing a bunch of different people from different sides of a conflict, and also pulling them into conversation.”

Throughout their internship experiences, all three students had pieces of their time at Wesleyan that popped up in their work. Inversely, now they all return for their senior year armed with improved research capabilities and real-world experience that can help their academic study.

The Anne Greene Internships in the Literary Arts honors the life and legacy of Anne F. Greene, University Professor of English, Emerita, who passed away earlier this year.