As most of you know, I’m now doing my internship at the NOS right now. It’s the last stage in my university life. I will graduate after August, if all goes well. By then, I can call myself Bachelor in Humanities, or something like that. It sounds ridiculous, but I’ll finally have the damn grade! I’m certainly not going for a masters degree straight after, because quite frankly, I’m a bad student.
My plan for the next year will be to first work for 6 months or so. I can’t leave the country in September for a long time, because the people from my orchestra will kill me. We’re attending a competition (concours) in November, and with me being the second solo-clarinet player, they can’t really miss me. This sounds arrogant maybe, but it’s the simple truth. If the first trumpet player would decide to go on a big holiday, I’d like to kill him too, so to speak 😉
Furthermore, the orchestra bought a new and very good clarinet for me last year, so I would be an ungrateful brat if I decided to go away for a long hiatus.
After the competition, and after 6 months of working, I’ll hopefully have enough money to travel for awhile. Some members of the greatest band on earth, Agalloch, have asked Milla, Nik and me to come and visit them in Portland in spring. I really hope this will happen, so I’m already saving money!
Internship
Meanwhile, I’m totally LOVING my internship. The work is so much fun, my colleagues are awesome and the atmosphere is a hectic, exciting one. I’m all the more glad, because the first internship that I had (the one I started last January), turned out to be a total disaster for me. I didn’t like the work at all, so I was a little scared for this internship as well. I was afraid that, again, I would hate the work. Turned out I my fear was totally wrong, because I love the work. I love writing so much, that I can do it all day without tiring of it. When you add the great atmosphere and funny moments in our workroom, it’s all the more fun.
The redaction I work with (about 8-10 people in our room) is on the same floor as Radio 3FM. The target audience for that radio is youth, aged 15-30 or so. Every day, there is a band playing live. Usually when I come in for work, the band is setting up their stuff. So everyday, I see bands that I know. On Tuesday, we had Di-rect (this is a Dutch rock-band). Wednesday we had Live, although someone informed me that the band doesn’t really exist anymore. The singer, Ed Kowalczyk, was there and performed some songs from Live, though.
The dj’s from the radio station are well known in the Netherlands, and I get to see them walking around ‘in the wild’ too, fun! I busy myself with writing articles on the website, and for Teletext. I work with two other people. The other people make the radio news-bulletins so they work with deadlines each hour.
Yesterday, with the plane crash in Libya, I experienced my first ‘disaster-day’ at the NOS. Everyone in the company was working their butts off. We didn’t take breaks, we got food delivered at our desks! For foreigners: the NOS broadcasts the news on the Dutch public television so the television people were constantly busy with gathering as much info as possible. Live broadcasts were given all the time.
In our room, the three television sets were tuned to different stations, the radio was on, we were talking excitingly….you can imagine the loud chaos going on there! I was overcome with a feeling of excitement. I know the airplane crash is horrible, I feel horror for the people and their families, but it was the first big thing I got to experience. I think everyone was excited. Time flew by so fast, it was insane. I had to work from 9 to 5, and I had barely blinked my eyes and it was over.
Well, now that I have a day off, I’m going to do nothing but read, relax and play a little Starcraft II beta :p
I’m very happy to know your internship is going so well -cos I remember how unhappy you were during the other one!
Great news about your colleagues: I believe that 3/4 of the joy of having a job that you like is made up of the camaraderie with colleagues. At least that is how it is for me.