A New Era for Me

Craiglochart Campus, Edinburgh Napier University - picture by sparky2000

As you may or may not know, I started my journalism studies at Edinburgh Napier University this year. We had to write four articles to start our new career with and as I never in my life have done anything similar to this, it was quite an experience.

The first one was an interview made in Princes Street Gardens so I grabbed my notebook and my pen and went for my “person hunt”. We had to find two people, elderly or tourists. I decided that the best would be to find an elderly tourist And so I did.

The first few people I asked said that they were not interested, they did not want to buy anything Even the elderly people were not kind and this was a shock for me. Grandma and grandpa are kind… Or at least they should be…

After walking my legs off, I finally found a gorgeous couple from Germany. The interview was exciting as I had no idea what to ask from them. Imagine: I had to write an article about a person’s life story… And I am not so good in preparing in advance, in fact, I do not believe you can prepare in advance for an interview if you do not know who the interviewee is going to be.

Anyway, I knew what I wanted to know I just did not have enough experience (especially in English), to ask the proper questions. After a while I got the angle of the story and I was unstoppable.

The second piece was an easier one for me: a profile of a journalist. I felt very lucky as I happen to know a Hungarian journalist (we went to the same University and had a class together), so I could do the interview in Hungarian and did not even have to struggle too much with the questions. We have known each other for three years now and I knew a lot of things about him.

Thus, I could prepare my questions in advance as I almost knew his answers as well. This happened to be an hour-long interview which I really enjoyed translating into English. I would love to do this all my life. It was also very comfortable as I did the interview through Skype and I could look into my lecture notes to check whether I was doing the right thing.

Our third article was a Parliament report. This was the hardest as I had to cope with the different accents of MSPs and also with words I have never heard before. I did not know the politicians either, so I tried to guess their names from the vowels I heard I was not sure if I could manage but I could even get some quotes.

Our final task was a feature for the BMI‘s in-flight magazine, the Voyager. We were asked to write something in connection with Edinburgh or Glasgow. As I work in a hotel restaurant this was not really difficult; I meet tourists every single day, I talk to them, I know why they choose certain restaurants and destinations so I decided to write about something regarding restaurants. I called the head-chef of the four star hotel, and we had a chat which I recorded. The result was a 1000-word article about the comfort of hotel restaurants.

In the future I would like to make a few changes: I would like to be more prepared as luck will not always accompany me throughout my academic studies. I will also have to get used to the different accents here and this might improve by listening to the radio or going to council meetings…and if I read more newspaper my vocabulary will improve and I will also get to know how certain articles look like, what makes them interesting and what readers want.