Where did you do your internship?
I did one at New California Media, a marketing advertising agency based in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and another one at the BBC in London.

Can you tell me what you did at the BBC?
I was involved with several things. I worked on what they called an “efficiency team.” We looked at issues that spanned some of the platforms in the news division to make those platforms more efficient while cutting costs. It was important that while doing this we not verge from the BBC’s core strategic aims. I also looked at other structural operations, areas such as how they use correspondents and how they plan big events, and did the same efficiency and cost-cutting exercises with those.

How did you get that internship?
It was initially through a personal contact I had met while working for the Associated Press. That contact was also on the BBC efficiency team and recommended me for the job. It was fun. I was the only person on the whole team that was completely new to the BBC. And I think I was the youngest there too.

Was this a paid position?
Yes.

So working for AP news really helped?
Yes, well, that got me in the door. Really it was the personal contacts I had made.

What surprised you the most about your time there (and disappointed you the most)?
I think what surprised me the most was how functionally people thought. My background was in marketing and finance although I had actually spent a few months working directly in a newsroom. But people at the BBC were trained functionally and that’s all they knew — there seemed to be relatively little cross-functional expertise.

There was definitely a mentality of “this is the way we’ve always done things before” and “this is the BBC way.” They never went outside the box to see the way other stations were doing things — not even CNN or SKY News. It was very much an internally focused operation, which really surprised me.

Because it’s a publicly funded institution, profits aren’t their first priority. They have other goals, such as providing diverse programming and education. Still, money is important and it was interesting to learn how that organization balanced those sometimes conflicting goals.

What would you say were the top three things that you learned or that mattered most to you?
The number one thing that I learned, personally, is to always look outside your comfort zone or your area of experience to see if you can improve things. Most people only look at what they already know.

Secondly, I learned about building a support group for change — if you’re trying to change something within an organization, this is critical. To change a way an organization works, you actually have to attack from both ends — bring people in from the ground up as well as from the top down. To be successful, you’ve got to convince people that they do need to change. The BBC have had previous efforts to cut costs, literally they wanted to cut a million annually, but it really falls to the people in the organization. And if you don’t convince the people you’ll never do anything.

The third thing that mattered to me was actually getting the chance to apply some of the skills and knowledge from business school to real life situations. After spending some time back in graduate school, it was interesting to find out that you could indeed apply the media management analysis you just learned to a news sector.

Do you have any advice for students that are trying to get internships there?
The BBC has a formal internship program. But really there are opportunities going on everywhere and all the time. Companies, especially big multi-media companies and especially those with multi-platforms, have so many things going on that you can structure your own internship. You can get very good experience with them. A lot of it is contacts — so talk to people you know and learn a bit more about the business, and think about what you can give to a company before you approach them. A good method is to contact former students such as myself and ask them for help in structuring proposals and potential contacts.

One of the things you should consider at the graduate level is that there are three different kinds of hills that you have to leap. Those are answering: Why should I hire an MBA? Why (and sometimes where is) Kellogg? And why should I hire you? Those are the three levels you have to navigate. The way you do that is to think what skills you bring to the table that maybe they don’t already have. That may be hard if you’re an undergraduate student, but you’ll be surprised at how open executives are at looking at new approaches of looking at the way they work. I ended up meeting people that are senior editors with multi-million dollar budgets who have been in the business 10 and 20 years and they were very willing to listen to me.