Trains, Games and the News

By Dean’s Intern Jacob Wallace at Summer By Rail

JacobWallaceTrainDuring my Summer By Rail internship with the Rail Passengers Association, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel the country by train, writing about transportation and infrastructure. Along the way, I also attended baseball games to demonstrate the places you could reach by train. Over the course of my trip, I spoke to 40 different public officials in 22 different cities, and was featured in over three dozen news outlets. Perhaps no period better exemplified this trip then the journey between my last two cities, Seattle and Vancouver.

On my trip, my time was equally divided between conducting research, being interviewed by local media, travelling and attending baseball games. To do all of this, in the span of 36 hours I took the Cascades train from Seattle to Vancouver, slept in my airbnb, woke up and spent the morning publishing backlogged blog posts, took photos of new Transit-Oriented Developments in Vancouver in the afternoon, attended a minor-league baseball game in the evening and then woke up at 4 am the next morning to be back in Seattle in time for the weekend morning show, where I did an on-air interview recapping my trip.

JWPix2I learned a lot about reporting, especially when it came to setting realistic goals for my level of output over the course of a marathon trip and learning to synthesize interviews I’ve taken on the fly into a coherent blog post. Through the Summer by Rail program, I got to visit so many different parts of the country and talk to people about how it is that they get from place to place. I’m immensely grateful for the opportunities this Dean’s Internship provided me.

Links:
NoMa blog post: http://summerbyrail.com/in-5-years-you-might-not-even-recognize-this-dc-neighborhood/

Seattle media appearance: https://www.king5.com/video/news/student-visits-19-ballparks-across-america/281-8176345

Baseball recap: http://summerbyrail.com/game-19-kansas-city-royals-vs-seattle-mariners/