Sitting in with a court reporter or interning with an agency is required by most court reporting programs as a requirement of graduation. Although many agencies do not offer an internship program, they do allow students to sit in with reporters and observe what a typical job may be. Sitting in with a reporter provides valuable experience. It can serve as motivation to pass out of school faster, provide extra practice time, help show what the profession entails and what a real-life job may be like. Learning procedure in class and practicing to a teacher’s dictation is not the same as experiencing it first-hand.
Benefits of an Internship
Sitting in court or depositions with a court reporter provides extra practice time and can motivate students to pass out of school faster. Working reporters may even share tips on how to write efficiently and accurately. Some fortunate students meet reporters who are willing to take them under their wing in a non-official or official mentor capacity. Oftentimes, reporters will share their own experience with school and offer helpful advice in how to succeed in school and beyond. These connections you make with reporters can serve as potential contacts in helping you find work after graduation. It always helps to be friendly and ask questions.
Hands-On Experience
As any reporter or student interning can tell you, a teacher’s dictation can be one-dimensional. If there is only one person doing the voice of two or three different people, practicing colloquy can be unrealistic. This is not the teacher’s fault. They are just simply one person. Experiencing colloquy while sitting in will help acclimate a student to a professional setting where you may have multiple attorneys, sometimes speaking over one another. It’s good to see how the reporter handles those types of situations and to also imagine what you may do. In times like those, you may want to stop the attorneys and ask them to take turns speaking since you can only take down one person at a time. It’s always good to prepare yourself for unfamiliar situations that school hasn’t prepared you for.
Not only does interning prepare you with colloquy, but it also helps prepare you with filling out job sheets, reading and understanding captions, writing under pressure, and transcribing and editing transcripts. Many students struggle with these aspects of reporting since schools usually focus more on attaining speed. Transcribing can be one of the most beneficial things a student can do. Becoming familiar with how your CAT system works, such as hot keys, include files, etc., will significantly cut down on transcription time upon starting work. An internship can offer you the experience you need to become a successful reporter.
Finding Internship Opportunities
When looking for an internship opportunity, there are a few things to keep in mind. Finding a good agency to intern with is crucial. Although any experience is good experience, you should also think of interning as a form of networking and finding potential employers. Spend your time interning with reputable and established agencies for whom you would like to work. Once you have found a few that you would like to intern with and potentially work for, call the agencies, explain that you are a court reporting student, and ask if you could sit in with one of their reporters. Most agencies will say yes. Others will ask you to call back another day when they have work for you to sit in on. Either way, be persistent.
Interning is probably one of the best things a student can do for themselves while at school. It gives you hands-on, real-life experience that schools simply can’t offer. A student who pushes back interning or doesn’t intern enough is severely disadvantaging themselves when they enter into the workforce. It is better to invest the hours now to learn the foundations of working in the real world than to work in the real world and be unprepared.
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