Lake Central started a new internship for the 2016-17 school year. The Personal Relations internship was created in order to make Lake Central’s name better. A student gets assigned to any school in the district with the focus on writing news stories and making a corporation newsletter.
“Mrs. [Melissa] Rettig, Guidance, and I were talking one day on how there is a lot of negative press on Lake Central. Very few of our good stories gets through, and she said it would be nice if we had an intern to do that kind of stuff and it kind of just grew from there,” Sarah Verpooten, Arts, said.
Students involved with this internship go to their assigned school during seventh period and find a new story to later publish.
“The PR internship is a new internship where we do a lot of ‘feel-good’ stories. So a lot of it is not really hard-hitting news or controversial stuff, more like stuff that regains your faith in humanity and makes the school look good,” Jennifer Chavarria (12) said.
In order to take the internship, you must have a pre-requisite in either Lake Central Television or in Publications. You also must have your own source of transportation to get you to and from the schools.
“[I want to do the internship because] internships look really good on college applications, also because I am considering getting into a career in journalism or something in that field. I think this class will be a really good opportunity for me to experience what it’s really like,” Hannah Hill (11) said.
The main goal of the PR internship is to make Lake Central appear as a great school with great people. When looking, they found many people to write news-worthy stories. For example, at Protsman, there is a blogger, Melissa Dillard, a teacher at Protsman, with 100,000 subscribers.
“We write through Northwest Indiana life, so 90 percent of our stories are going through there. If you google [our schools], you are going to see some of the bad [news], but [also] a lot of the good stories that we are writing. It helps promote the good things happening at our schools,” Chavarria said.
