1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
SUMMER INTERNSHIP – BRANDON BYERS
Introduction
Provide the name and location of the site at which you completed the internship, as well as your
supervisor’s name and title. What were your learning objectives?
My internship was a Cumberland Valley Christian Radio station in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. My
supervisor was Giff Briner the board president of the radio station. My first learning objective
was to learn how to write announcements and promos for on-the-air. My second learning
objective was to be able to create rotations with the StudioPlaylist program. My third objective
was to be able to download programs and put them into the rotation by myself. My last learning
objective was to improve my voice in recordings by listening to critiques from my coworkers.
Work/Projects
What type of work did you do? What projects did you work on?
Most of my job was production and writing related. I wrote up event announcements for the
Community Bulletin Board as well as promos for some of the stations in-house programs. I also
wrote newsletters for the station. I downloaded weekly and daily programs for the station. I also
recorded scripts, to be played on the air, along with my coworkers. One project I worked on was
editing Bible Readings and audio book for the radio station chaplain. I removed long periods of
silence as well as background noise from the recordings using the program Audacity. The
recording were going to be put on CD’s so I had to edit the lengths of them so that the file size
would not be too big. After that I burned them onto CD’s and printed labels to put on them. I also
worked on his audiobook. I removed background noise as well as long periods of silence. I also
edited the lengths of them so that they would be able to fit on the CD’s as they were WAV files.

2. Later he wanted to make copies to give to other people so I needed to reduce the number of
CD’s. To do this I converted each of the files from WAV to MP3. I was then able to format the
CD as a data disk and I was then able to reduce the number of CD’s from 12 to 2.
Learning
Provide specific examples of what you learned.
I learned how to download programs for the station. Every week I went onto a program called
the CORE and downloaded the next week’s programs. Some of them are daily programs and
some are just weekend.
I learned how to add background music to a recording and do an auto-duck. To do this added the
music file into Audacity along with the original recording. I then moved the music to the top
track and used the auto-duck effect. This effect allowed me to lower the volume of the music
when the vocal recording is playing. I then choose how many decibels I wanted to reduce the
music by.
I also learned how to communicate with my coworkers and ask questions. When I was not sure
how to do something I asked. For example, I was going over the playlists that I had created and
one of the hours was too long. So I asked my coworker which song should I take out, and she
told me.
Another thing that I learned was that you need to monitor a person’s audio levels when you are
recording them. The radio station chaplain came in to add to his audiobook. When I was

3. recording him my coworker told me that I needed to watch his levels and constantly adjust his
mic to ensure that his levels were even and that they did not clip.
One of the most important things that I learned was how to work around problems at my site. A
few weeks after I started my internship, one of the computers in the studio died, and had to be
rebuilt. This meant that we had to record the announcements in another production room, and we
had to start early because there were people who were going to recording in the same room later.
To work around the problem were started ahead of time and I focused so I wouldn’t need to do
multiple takes. While it was frustrating, I learned that things can happen that are out of my
control and I have to learn to adapt and work around them.
Future Plans
Explain how this experience has impacted your future plans for study and work.
The impact that it had on me was the importance of hands on work experience. This fall I am
going to do a practicum with the campus television station to get more hands on experience. It
also taught me that I need to skills in different areas. At my internship I learned that there are not
a lot of radio jobs and most of them do not pay very much, with the exception of live
personalities. As a result I am going to get skills in television production on campus and then,
hopefully an internship at a television news station. I also want to network with more people in
the radio and television fields as well.
Preparation/Recommendations
In what ways did your major-specific classes assist you in this experience?
What recommendations, if any, would you make to your academic department?

4. My Writing for Mass Media class helped me with writing radio scripts. In the class we learned
the inverted pyramid, which is who, what, when, where, and why. This helped me to order the
information for the radio announcements in the best possible way. It also helped me with writing
station newsletters as I wrote press releases in the class. Another class that helped me was Basic
Video and Editing, in this class I learned how to how edit video and audio, and because my
internship involved editing audio, this class was very useful to me.
One recommendation that I would make to my academic department would be to have more
classes where students create their own content and learn technical skills, such as editing. I
personally feel that there are not enough of these classes in the Communication department.
While speech and communication classes are good, they are not as useful to a student in media
production.