FT Life & Arts by Fernando Augusto Pacheco

Thursday 26 May 2011

Being an avid reader of the FT Weekend, I was incredibly happy to get an internship for my favourite section of the paper, Life & Arts.I’ve done some internships before, but I have to say, I felt a little bit anxious on my first day, as I never worked in an office with so many people, and well, it’s the FT. But the anxiety was over right at the beginning when lovely Farhana introduced me to everyone and showed me around the office and after that I had an induction on the internal computer system with Yasmin, which was really helpful.When I arrived, everybody was so busy, it was deadline and after 2 bank holidays in a row, this came as no surprise, but everybody was really nice to me and I didn’t feel intimidated at all.On my first week, I had several tasks, from research to fact-checking, which I actually quite liked doing. I also tried to keep updated about new events to update the list of upcoming events, from fashion weeks to book fairs around the world. The first thing I did every morning is to ‘tweet’ the main Arts stories of the day. A press view of the new Ai Weiwei exhibition at Somerset House was part of my duties too. I’ve also had the chance to write an assignment for the travel page.My first week was very good, and I’m sure the rest of my internship will be too.