There’s a certain amount of anticipation involved in starting your first internship, especially when that internship is with one of the largest broadcasting companies in the country. That being said, I was ready.
Set in an old printing factory, the XM building’s brick facade gives off an air of assembly lines and denim jumpsuits. The inside, however, is like Starbucks meets The Office. The hallways are lined with blown up pictures of music legends rocking out, and hanging from the rafters (there is mostly no ceiling) are parabolic dishes often seen on the sidelines of football games trying to catch the sound of a bone crunching hit. The irony of these dishes is that instead of capturing sound they are actually directing the feed from various in-house radio stations straight down onto circular patches on the floor where, if standing inside of the circle, you can listen to the show.
Monday was orientation, and lucky for me a former Sirius intern had let me in on the secret that I would get made fun of if I showed up in a full suit. As for the session itself, as to be expected it was a lot of introductions and administrative rambling. Still feeling fairly excited, I returned back to the dorm to find out that some of my fellow SIWJ program-ers were already getting articles published and projects assigned. I tried to rationalize, telling myself that it was only the first day and that I knew going in to it that this was only an orientation session and that later in the week I’d start doing more important work.
I went back in Tuesday ready for training, excited that I’d be getting to learn the Sirius system and see what kind of stuff I’d be doing this summer. After getting a refresher course in how to log into a computer and why Sirius/XM needs to keep their broadcasting computers separate from their corporate computers (spoiler alert: it’s because one does numbers and one does sounds!), I was sent home with menial information and discontent.
Thursday rolled around and my last training session with it. Needless to say I wasn’t expecting much because I had come to expect that “training” just meant a lot of talking. And I was right, for the most part. We spent about an hour going over packet after packet of formatting guidelines and basic sound-cutting tutorials, and then were cut loose to go practice using their editing tool to cut old interviews. Other than getting to listen to Derek Jeter elaborate on the effect laughter in the clubhouse can have on winning baseball games, I walked out into the 1 million degree heat wondering what I got out of a week’s worth of training…
A badge? That was cool, but it didn’t even say “Sirius/XM” on it.
A Sirius/XM corporate email account? Also cool, but my name was spelt wrong.
Knowledge of the Sirius/XM building and computer system? Necessary and, as you can guess, cool. But it all could have been done in one day and then we could have moved on to actually doing stuff.
I couldn’t really come up with anything of substance, which left me feeling a bit over-stimulated and under-fulfilled. Amid the stories of great work the rest of the program was doing, I couldn’t help but feel like I had a week of my internship wasted on stuff that could have all been done in one day. In the end, I could at least lean on two things; 1) my internship runs three weeks longer than the SIWJ program, so a slow start is not the end of the world, and 2) I still get to spend my summer in DC.
Nick Rothschild 