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An externship is two to five days of job-shadowing experience during the January interim session. Immersing students in daily activities helps them gain a better understanding of career fields. Externs experience varied activities such as attending meetings, touring the workplace, visiting with clients, and meeting with other members of the organization. Contact Rachel Nelson Moeller ’88, associate director of internships and externships in career services, moellerr@lafayette.edu, for more information or to sign up.
Emily Goldberg ’05 isn’t quite ready for her close-up. Instead, she enjoys working behind the scenes on NBC’s “The Today Show.”
It was a speech by William Wermuth ’98 at Lafayette that changed her life. As head of the page program at NBC, Wermuth made the program sound irresistible. Goldberg secured an externship with him through the Office of Career Services.
Over two days, she toured the studios, talked with human resources representatives, went to a taping of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and spent an afternoon at MSNBC learning about news programming. She also had meetings with “Today Show” co-anchor Matt Lauer, NBC’s director of operations, and guest relations specialists.
Goldberg applied to be a page — along with about 10,000 other people. Accepted with 50 other recent graduates, she gave tours of the NBC studios to groups of 30 people.
As vice president for membership of her sorority at Lafayette, she was used to being outgoing, but these tours were something different.
“Nothing would have prepared me for giving tours five times a day,” she says.
Working six days a week, she also had the chance to rotate into other departments and television shows through another competitive process. She worked as an administrative assistant at “Dateline,” a greenroom escort for “The Today Show,” and as an assistant at “Mad Monday” for CNBC.
The page program made no promises of job placement, and Goldberg packed up and decided to travel for a few months before hunkering down to look for a job.
Instead, NBC called with a job opportunity within weeks. She began in August 2006 as an assistant to a senior “Today Show” producer. Her contract ended in August and she impressed her employers enough to be retained as a research assistant, a position that also supports the show’s producers. Eventually she’d like to be a producer herself.
“You don’t have to get a master’s degree in journalism to be able to do this,” says Goldberg, a history and government & law graduate. “It’s a lot of on-the-job training.”