Summer in London Honors Program

Description of the video:

[00:00:06]
>> Each summer a group of Media School students are chosen to make the trek to London, where they live, study and work for several weeks. When they arrive, the students have a few days to settle in before hopping on the tube and scattering around the city to their internships.

[00:00:23]
London will not wait for you. That's a good piece of advice that you need to act like you know what's going on. You need to have a plan before you leave the house, so that you don't look like a tourist. Almost everyone takes the tube to work. I mean there have been a couple times where I've been facing the doors and I had to turn away because if I were facing the doors as they were closing my nose would have definitely gotten caught.

[00:00:46]
I work right next to King's Cross station, which is a really famous train station. It has Platform 9 3/4 from Harry Potter. It's actually not that far from here. My commute is about forty minutes on a busy day. Three days a week, students work among the city's professionals.

[00:01:05]
I work for a company called the National Student, and it is a completely student-run organization and publication where all the writing is done by students and all the editing is done by students. It's called E.L. Gazette, and it's this international English language newspaper that is distributed throughout the U.K., in China, the U.S., Australia.

[00:01:28]
All over the world. It’s a media platform that actually makes content, so that was also part of it. So Sierra Leone has basically a school system in Sierra Leone where most, if not all, of the teachers are actually Sierra Leonians. A lot of the teachers are previous students, so it's a really organization.

[00:01:57]
A British office is kind of more equal, I guess, in that the owner of the company and other people that are high up kind of sit where you do. They sit at little tables. They're taking on interns because they need the manpower, so I'm not just there asking people what they want in their tea or what kind of tea they want. If anything, they’re always getting me tea because they drink up to six cups a day. Through their internships, students begin to feel rooted in British culture and current events.

[00:02:29]
After a terrorist attack at London Bridge and Borough Market shocked the city, Spencer Davis's placement, The National Student, had him on the ground covering the reopening of Borough Market. It was just incredible to see the resilience of this city, and I'm so thankful that they gave me the opportunity to cover it. Emily Abshire came up with the idea to interview Declan McKenna, a well-known young British artist, about his thoughts on the election. So seeing these artists talking on about it, people who are like really cool and that people actually really like is so, so important for young people.

Luma Khabbaz launched an initiative asking people to host garden parties as fundraisers for Educaid Sierra Leone. She researched garden party etiquette and made her pitch via social media and flyers she designed. On the days they're not working the program give students a chance to learn from journalists on the cutting edge of the industry and visit international media outlets.

[00:03:33]
The class of 2019 was led in their instruction by long-time Londoner with Hoosier connections, renowned broadcast journalist John Owen. I realized over the past few weeks how easy it is to learn a new place. Like I already feel really knowledgeable on the transportation system and the neighborhoods and the different words people use to describe different things.

[00:03:58]
It really honestly is something that is very emotional and like spiritual to me in a way to be back in the country that I was born in. Coming here has been more of a reality check, but it's definitely real for me that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, which is reporting. I thought I was going to kind of be here more just to like enjoy the city, and I really found myself focusing a lot on my internship because of how strongly I feel for it.