My Interning Life: Ben Cuzzupe

Today on My Interning Life, Ben Cuzzupe tells us in his own words how he chose to chase his dreams over attending university classes. 

BY BEN CUZZUPE

My Interning Life Guest Post

This blog quite possibly could be the key to everything you ever dreamed of being.

Some of the advice within these pages can kick down doors that you’ve only ever seen before in your dreams.

However, you might not get that internship you’ve been after. It’s a very competitive world, so some have to prepare themselves for when it all doesn’t go to plan. But even then, your own hard work and creativity can come to the forefront.

Many of the suggestions previous interns have made, is that you start your own blog or creative outlet for your ideas. Bound For Glory is an example of what can happen when you stick to something instead of a traditional internship.

In March of this year I had begun my first year of university at La Trobe, and at this point I didn’t have my license, so two hours on that ride. With the help of a team like-minded journalism students, amateur football writers and bunch of other BigFooty forum-ites along for the ride, set up ‘Bound For Glory’, an AFL radio program on SYN FM out of RMIT over the summer.

One day, as we were planning our first episode to coincide with the season launch at the end of March, one the people on the show, who is an employee of the North Melbourne Football Club notified me of an event. (Some clubs media policies vary from the rigid and selective, to the open and carefree; and North Melbourne was one of the latter.)

He began to tell me about an Open Media Day that the club was having, where all of the players and the coaches would be gathered and I could pick openly from whom to speak to for our opening show, regardless of if I had fifty years or minutes of experience. It was the perfect opportunity, the one opening to get the show off the mark and pull a substantial audience for ten people broadcasting something out of the middle of nowhere, right off the bat.

The one flaw in the plan was that I didn’t own a recording device and the next day of university I had a tute that was critical to my marks for the semester. The thoughts dangled and wavered for a couple of days, but I stuck to Uni until I came to the day before the Open Media day.  It was either the Upfield train or the Heidelberg train or whatever people in the northern suburbs use to get from one place to another; and for some reason instead of ending up at Flinders Street so I could change to get on to the Sydenham line, it ended up at Melbourne Central.

The ultimatum rattled around in my head for the past couple of days, in which I decided to make a choice in the blink of an eye:
Go to my tute the next morning, in which I would be placed in groups for the most important assignment for my semester, or ditch the class and University for a year to go interview football players.

I’ll never claim divine intervention or it was the most resoundingly intellectual decision either; but I got off the train, walked into a shop on Little Lonsdale Street, haggled down the price for the digital recorder and made up my mind.
Defer from University for a year to run the radio show along with a talented but mostly untried team, and make some contacts in the industry.

What seemed to be one of the most utterly insane decisions that I had ever made in my life, in retrospect nine months later turned out to be the smartest one I ever made. That day I interviewed several players (Sam Wright, Todd Goldstein, Matt Campbell) and coach Brad Scott.

In the space of a week, our opening show went from looking to fill air time with awkward conversation, to having a lengthy interview with Age journalist and one of the most humble people I’ve ever met, Rohan Connolly, (who got out of bed quite early on a Saturday morning to hang around a recording studio riddled with faults and a bunch of caffeine addled students), Warney of DT TALK (fantasy football analyst) fame, St.Kilda star Nick Dal Santo and the other interviews I and one of the co-producers had collected on that day.

We added some others to our team of the course of the year and we managed to interview AFL, journalists, umpires, presidents, players and many other people from the TAC Cup and the VFL. Most importantly, we grew as a team and our writing, recording, presenting abilities and audience increased tenfold.

The bubbling chemistry that this team of talented, optimistic, honest, ballsy, funny and outright insane people grew again when one of us, Matt Marsden, decided to launch and run an independent news/ opinion site in July of this year.

We’re a decent chance for AFL media accreditation and sponsors next year too, but even if it doesn’t happen, we’ll just grow again because you can’t contain that sort of raw energy and enthusiasm that exists with the idealistic and driven.

In the age of the internet, the information and ideas are now democratized and everyone is an artist of some sort.  The old guard (newspapers, television, radio) are struggling to see that regular people with regular lives can create the same, if not better magic that’s created in professional environments.

I don’t want to be the editor of the Herald Sun, or rally against the system where a professional journalist have slaved their whole lives to create fantastic paid content. The whole point of this is to create interest in the job and profession, and to give nobodies a leg up and a beginning into this confusing and fast paced medium.

I hope to someday do a proper internship elsewhere, but for now, this is more than enough. Get online, get creativity and the rewards will come.

Ben Cuzzupe is the Executive Producer of @BoundForGloryFM and a contributor for the @BoundForGloryNews. You can also follow Ben on Twitter.