Last summer, a little over a year ago, I started with NAVAIR as an intern in Public Affairs but sitting in the Visual Information building. Around late November, I made the transition to a paid Pathways internship, working specifically with Jamie Cosgrove, the lead PAO for the Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons (PEO (&W)). In that transition, from summer to fall semester, there was a bit of a culture shock.
We’ll get to that in a minute.
The top two most exciting and poignant memories I have from last summer were my first published article and a photo excursion with the visual information team.
My first article was about the Sailor of the Year award. There are dozens of winners and numerous categories, but my sailor (and yes, I thought of him as my sailor) was stationed in Afghanistan with a family and a young son living in California. He loved sports and played in an intramural league when he was home, coaching his son’s peewee soccer (?) team on the side. Through a string of emails, missed phone calls and shoddy international connection, I got to know him as a person. I felt personally responsible for how I presented him in my story – I was super conscious of my readers and I wanted them to feel as connected and proud of this young Navy dad as I did.
My story went through five rounds of edits and I learned my first AP style lessons. A number of the personal elements were taken out of the story, but once ready to be published, I pushed the piece to his hometown and his parent’s hometown paper. They picked it up. He was ecstatic and so grateful. After reading about his accomplishments and having a close friend in the Marines, I felt like I should be thanking him for the privilege of being about to write about him life, not the other way around.
My adventures with the visual team spanned the summer. I received my bachelor’s in English and visual art (particularly photography) this past May and knowing that, Victor (our intern supervisor at the time) gave me the opportunity to both write and photograph. I went to the AUVSI competition at Webster field, trying my hand at videography and artistic photojournalism. Kelly (one of our photographers) gave me incredible advice on how to make my shots stronger and more interesting.
So we started a piece on a juvenile bald eagle on base. Bald eagles are a threatened species and this youngin was hanging around humans, close to roads and active beaches. As a threatened species, the eagles nests cannot be touched. And neither can the birds themselves. Our photographers were rushing out the door – someone had just reported a sighting and they were hoping to actually get photos in round two of eagle-hunting – and they invited me along. We probably spent 15 minutes looking for the dark bird in the dark trunks of swamp trees. Kelly spotted him and we set up our equipment.
We were using a massive lens to photograph the eaglet when three military police cars came roaring up to us and screeching to a halt across the road. They questioned us ad nauseum about our cameras, our purpose for being on the side of the road, sweating and staring into the trees. After a while, they actually took our word that we were with visual information and went on their way.
On our ride back to home base, we saw an old tug boat which we preceded to race (in our government van) so that Kelly could get shots out of the side window. A mile later, we had pulled over again to try and get some shots of feeding vultures. Please keep in mind; this is a mid-90s July afternoon.
We arrived back at the lab with shots of two different kinds of birds, old boats and a lot of empty swamp trees (of when we missed the camouflaged eaglet).
My current position is decidedly sans sailor profiles and avian car chases.
There are pros and cons to my position now (and it will probably take a second post to explain fully). I work directly with a Public Affairs Officer now. On one hand, I no longer have the freedom to chase my own stories and find beautifully interesting and diverse people who work on this base. I don’t have time to go sprinting out of the office in search of threatened species, or spend an entire afternoon documenting a young designers’ unmanned aircraft competition. However, I am learning, from the ground up, what it means to truly be in a Public Affairs role.
My days are now filled with writing, editing and reading press releases on accomplished program milestones, archiving media queries in a metrics database, collecting and distributing news relevant to the PEO and PMAs and taking a course on Acquisition 101 (so that I can actually understand the jargon floating around). I sit and listen to phone conferences about the upcoming UCAS carrier trials and take copious notes, trying to recognize each participant’s voice and remember who they are, why their important and what their position is.
I’m in an entry-level Public Affairs position and, as such, am learning from the very basis of what Public Affairs people actually do. I am the point person for the quieter, less boisterous, weapons side of our PEO, but I am getting valuable and informative experience in how to manage relationship with various players in the different PMAs and how to field the few media queries we receive. (I’m definitely going to cover my current position more in a second post.)
My biggest fear last summer was learning enough to not screw up in enough of a giant, horrible, tragically terrible way to not be invited back. That was worded poorly, but the point is, I liked the work I was doing and I was intrigued to see where I could go. My position is complex – it is easy in some ways and difficult in others. I have so much to learn and, as a perfectionist and someone who used to pride herself on not making the same mistake twice, I have had to learn (and am still learning) to accept myself as new to my position and ignorant of many things I needed to learn(although I still struggle with that on a constant basis).
As one of the PAOs recently and offhandedly mentioned, I was lucky to be the intern who happened to go to school in the area and be asked to apply for this paid Pathways position. It could have been anyone. And it’s that humbling realization that makes me realize that maybe it was more about time and place rather than talent (though certain minimum requirements have to be met, of course) and that I lucked my way into this current position. I’m super grateful and super aware of the talent that surrounds me in my fellow interns and I hope that throughout the rest of this summer, I can continue to learn the things I need to learn from the older PAOs and from my fellow entry-level, passionate interns.
Fun fact: I’m the youngest person in a paid PAO position by 11 years…
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