THe Bangsar Boy: Earning my first RM1

I don’t think I mentioned before but a couple of weeks ago, we had two young teenagers from the French School of Kuala Lumpur “interning” with us. Because they were only 14, we couldn’t really give them real work so they were observing most of the time.

Since we couldn’t let them go out and tag our journalists, I arranged for them to learn a few things about how a newspaper worked: they spent a lot of time at my department observing how we work (and shout at each other), I arranged for a tour of our printing plant and the multimedia studios, for them to meet the marketing services team as well as advertising team to find out what role they play in a newspaper etc.

I was told that they had a good time, but even if they didn’t, I’d imagine by the end of the week, they’d have a good idea about what it’s like working in a newspaper. And when I asked them after, they told me that they are still keen on journalism as a career.

It must be nice to have had this opportunity. They French syllabus requires all 14 year olds (well, technically 15) to fulfil this requirement. I suppose it is never too late to start thinking about your future.

This story leads in to stories of my “jobs” when I was still in school in this week’s The Bangsar Boy, my fortnightly column. You can read the article here.

Despite everything I said in the article though, I was quite lucky because I knew I wanted to be a journalist since I was very young, and that was confirmed when I turned 16 and explored journalism.

I guess you can never be too young after all.

11.50am Malaysian time (+8 GMT)

Tags: bangsar boy, french school of kuala lumpur, journalism, newspaper, The Star