Newsweek and Time Give UT Students Crash Course in Covering a Convention

Surviving off of Clif Bars and coffee, UT interns for Newsweek/The Daily Beast at the Republican National Convention worked as long as 16 hours a day. They helped produce live interviews, ran after billionaires and even fetched lattes for John and Cindy McCain.

“The work was exhausting,” said Katelyn Edwards ’15, an English major. “However, it was the most phenomenal experience. Sometimes, as college students, we can get caught up in this Never Never Land that is our college experience; we forget that there's a world going on outside of the UT campus. Internships are a great way to step outside of that mindset and bring back useful experience to apply to our work within the classroom.”

Garrett Hetrick ’12, who was also hired as a staff assistant for the publications, at one point found himself at a dinner table with a Newsweek vice president, an aid for the Mitt Romney campaign, a Stanford professor, a British author, two reporters and a documentary filmmaker.

“It was so surreal to be sitting at the table,” said Hetrick, an international business management major. “I kept expecting to wake up from a dream.”

Hetrick and Edwards were both invited to Meghan McCain’s charity gala at the Glazer Children’s Museum where they watched county music singer Sara Evans perform. It was just one of the star-studded moments for the students who were just as struck by the political stars they watched from inside the convention.

“I was so excited to get a chance to be in the middle of the action,” Hetrick said. “I am personally a Republican, however, I would have happily volunteered at the Democratic National Convention. This was a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”

Also at the convention was Giovanna De Leo ’14, a UT student hired as a public relations intern for Time magazine.

De Leo, an international business and marketing major with a Spanish minor, spent the week promoting the CNN/Time Convention Floor Pass mobile application, handing out Time’s convention posters and doing other guerrilla marketing.

“It's been exhilarating,” De Leo said. “I've bumped into multiple famous faces, and actually had the chance to speak with some of them. Time magazine was such a fun corporation to work with. I made some really great connections within that network, and it definitely helped me enhance my resume.”

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