It is amazing what you can learn in just two weeks. As winner of the 2003 Seameo-Australian press award, I was privileged to go for a three-week internship with a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia. The organizers of the award left it pretty much up to me where I wanted to do my internship. I chose The Age after being informed by Sue Neales of Asialink (who was organizing my trip) that they had a strong education section that was widely read. As an education writer, I thought I would learn a lot even from just observing how things were done at The Age.

I was excited also because in my eight years as a journalist, I have always wondered how other newspaper organizations, outside Malaysia, function. And though I have met many foreign journalists on assignments, both in Malaysia and overseas, I was curious to see how I would fare as a journalist in anywhere else in the world. Would I sink or would I swim? Would I, when it came to the crunch, be able to deliver?

I honestly did not know what to expect. In two weeks (my stay was divided into two parts – two weeks with The Age and a final week visiting popular sights in Victoria for a travel story to be published in The Star), how much could I do? And, knowing how busy the newsroom is, I was seriously wondering how much attention I would get.

I started my stint at The Age on Monday, April 19 and was introduced to Shane Green, the education editor. A highly experienced journalist, Shane briefed me on how things worked at The Age, introducing me to some of the senior writers and editors and got me set up at a workstation.
He was also receptive to a couple of story ideas I had and provided me with the necessary contacts for me to get started. And so, I started working on a story about problems and complexities faced by foreign students in Victoria’s international students programme (which was eventually published in The Age’s education section).

It was great. Everyone – from the teachers to the education department officers – was co-operative and helpful and I was really inspired as it was good fun, sniffing out stories, going all out to authenticate them and writing them in a way that would be of interest to the public.
In the course of conducting the aforementioned interviews, I found several other story ideas which I subsequently developed and wrote out for my newspaper, The Star, in Malaysia. I also had the opportunity of accompanying Shane on an interview with Lynne Kosky, the state education minister, which was very interesting.

Two weeks passed very quickly and before I knew it, I was celebrating my last day at The Age having lunch with my colleagues on the education desk.

Though brief, my time at The Age was invaluable in my evolution as a journalist. For one, it gave me the exposure I needed, the confidence to know that there are stories to be found and told and that I was capable of sniffing them out albeit in a foreign place. It was also great meeting with and learning from the journalists at The Age, many of whom have worked for many years in various capacities – news journalists, foreign correspondents, feature writers, sub editors, etc. The Age in quite different from The Star in that it is focused on news and events in the state and then national and only then on the events around the world. So too with the Education section. As such, reporters (and me too during my time there) had to be very sensitive to the issues that relate to the everyday people and not just global issues. This has helped me sensitize myself to the people around me here. A sensitive journalist is a good journalist.

Journalists are not classroom trained. Experience, exposure and being where the action and people are where journalists learn and better themselves. This is why experiences like placements and fellowships are crucial. My time at The Age broadened my horizons and I think the programme is very important for all journalists. It would however have been more beneficial if the duration was a little longer, allowing the journalist to perhaps experience working in a few other sections of the paper like news (which is crucial for all journalists to experience I think).