Ask Sara 1 — Building Early An Career & Portfolio
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/05
Sara Al Iraqiya is a USA-based 2nd generation Iraqi-American social scientist, writer, producer, and activist. Raised under Sunni Islam and a survivor of attempted radicalization in American mosques and centers — she has both lived experience as well as academic experience with Islam. Sara aims to educate her fellow lovers of Western civilization on the horrors, inequalities, and injustices that occur in geographically Western mosques and Islamic centers.
Sara has been published in two languages (and counting). A world traveller, she briefly lived in France, Jordan, and even Cuba in order to complete her Masters of Arts in Global Affairs specializing in Global Culture and Society. Sara Al Iraqiya’s has been published in Conatus News and Spain’s ALDE Group. She has also been featured on CRTV and Compound Media.
This session started on the prominent media outlets and publications. Al Iraqiya has experience with writing pitches and developing a voice in the large online environment seen now.
Al Iraqiya’s opening advice, “Write up a ‘pitch,’ watermark it accordingly, and send out your pitches to whoever will read them. Be a loud mouth — talk to people. In the past, perhaps the advice was ‘slow and steady wins the race.’ Today, that is outdated advice. The faster you can move up, the faster you should move up. Accept any and all internships in relation to writing or whatever your media or journalistic endeavour may be.”
Al Iraqiya sees the potential in internships for young people. The possibility to acquire valuable early career experience, beneficial to later career development and advancement. However, she notes the unpaid nature of many of them, which, of course, remains one of the common complaints about them.
However, she continued with a nuanced shift in perspective on school and paid work, and unpaid internships and paid work. The work and school combination reflects the admixture of an unpaid internship and paid work at a less-than-pleasurable job. She remarked some manner of greater-reward-than-loss with the sacrifices.
The next stage of this sessions was on the working environment of the larger publications or outlets. That is, the modern work environment is somewhat the same and somewhat different to the work environments of prior generations. Nonetheless, teamwork, cooperation, coordination, and so on, become necessary for a harmonious work environment.
“The role of the internet in the way we communicate, in my experience, is a wonderful thing. One can work remotely for example with a large, global cooperative but can easily connect via social media platforms. I did this with Conatus News,” Al Iraqiya stated, “And, of course, because it is a global team you will hear from many, as you say asynchronous voices as bias is always present and it is largely shaped by our environment.”
She continued to note the continual publication of different materials in different ways over time. There will be a need, in the new electronic work environment, to be comfortable with working in different time zones. Also, the virtue of patience has become ever-more important in the current media landscape.
Thus, Al Iraqiya recommended, as emphasis, the need for internships once more. It is also relevant to keep apace and in-contact with fellow writers.
Al Iraqiya concluded, “Why? Because it is fun and everyone wins. You may disagree with your peers, agree with them, though you disagreed with them but they opened your eyes to new possibilities, and perhaps you return that favour. It is all highly rewarding.”
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