On my second day on the job, I’d found myself mushing together a blend of anchovies, chicken liver juice, and other ingredients. The pungent mix was the premise of a magazine video, and I was the hand model showing off how easy it was to make your own catfish bait.

  Not exactly a typical first week experience. Now, I’ve never hunted in my life, and I can maybe think of two times I’ve ever held a fishing pole, so finding out my assigned magazine was going to be Field & Stream was a little confusing and worrying at first. How could they possibly think, that I, a Chicago girl, knew the first thing about the difference between a smallmouth and largemouth bass.

   But as the summer went on, I realized it didn’t really matter that I couldn’t distinguish the two (even my editors admitted that it’s not an easy tell to the untrained eyes, making me feel much better). Before the internship started, my boss sent me a package with old issues. With that limited exposure, I was nervous and unsure what to expect.

   But now with the internship over, I couldn’t be more thankful for my experience and the magazine I ended up at. While it’s not a usually first choice compared to more recognizable publications, it is one that deeply wants to make sure you make the most of the summer and learn as much as you can. For me that meant anything from hand modeling on the second day to editing magazine features to writing front of the book content. I scheduled social media posts and assisted with Snapchat, posting to the account and appearing in a weekly segment. I edited and built blog posts everyday, even writing a few of my own. I’ve edited a video and even filled in for my managing editor the last week, making sure pages were successfully printed and passed around the office for edits.