Meet NCHS Senior Ambereen Sadiq, New Canaanite Intern [Q&A]

On Tuesday, 324 New Canaan High School seniors started internships across 235 businesses and organizations in the community and departments at Town Hall, under the district’s hugely popular Senior Internship Program. We’re very excited here to have Ambereen Sadiq as our intern. New Canaanite readers will see her byline appear in the morning newsletter through mid-June. Here’s an introductory Q&A.

New Canaanite: Tell me about what was your experience at New Canaan High School that led you to do this internship out of everything as a senior?

Ambereen Sadiq: I spent my first year-and-a-half at Westhill High School in Stamford and then when I transferred schools I decided to take on a journalism class. And originally I went into it thinking, ‘Oh, I like writing and writing has always been a strength of mine.’ So I thought, ‘This is another writing class and I’ll just get an easy A.’ And then once I really got into the class and saw that it wasn’t just a writing class, it was really structured like a newspaper, I really started getting into it. And I loved going out and I loved interviewing and I loved writing articles and eventually, after doing it for a couple of years, all the way to my senior year, I loved it so much that I’m going to take it up as a major.

So you envision yourself being a journalism major in the next phase?

Yes.

What are your plans for after NCHS?

I will be studying journalism and communications at UMass Boston. As far as career paths go, I know print journalism isn’t as popular as it was and nobody really reads the newspaper.

That’s true.

But I still want to maybe write editorials, or best-case scenario I’ll be writing for Vogue.

So you may would do longer form magazine journalism?

Yes.

Tell me more about your experience at NCHS. Who were your teachers in this area and what was it like writing for the Courant? 

I think one teacher I really admired the most was my journalism teacher who I unfortunately never had for English, which I wish I could’ve, Mr. [Mike] McAteer. He wrote my recommendations and he’s always been a great support system, especially as a teacher. And he’s definitely very inspiring and I guess one of the reasons that I’m deciding to pursue journalism as a long-term thing. As far as my experience in writing for the Courant, obviously I love it. Writing for the Courant was a very collaborative experience. How the class is run, the teachers don’t really do anything but guide you. But everything else is run by the students. You have the editors-in-chief, the editors and they’re all students. And it basically just runs through a bunch of people where it’s edited by students and everything. I was an editor for the Arts and Tech section in my senior year, and I really liked it because I got to have that experience of guiding other newer students to writing the best article they could write. I like to think that I’m part of that experience.

Our readers will be reading your news articles for the next few weeks, starting tomorrow [Wednesday]. What is something else that you would tell our readers about yourself?

That’s a really hard question. Talking about myself is a little hard for me.

That’s a nice quality.

I can’t really talk about myself. It’s hard to get into specifics. I feel like I’m self-aware to an extent.

How about: What are some of your interests outside of writing and journalism?

I like talking to people. I’m a people person. I think that’s why I like interviewing so much. I like getting to know people. I’m a bit shy but once I’m in that headspace, I can talk about anything.

That’s a good quality to have, that ability to behave in an extroverted way, when you’re a journalist. Because you do need to talk to people and you also need to be enough of a people person that there’s trust established quickly. Trustworthiness is one of those rare qualities that you can’t decide to be—other people bestow it on you. You can decide you’re going to be more generous or more patient but you can’t just decide that you’re going to be more trustworthy. People have to see that in you. It comes from without, right?

Yes.

How are you feeling about these next few weeks of the internship before graduation?

I’m really excited because I feel like I’ll be provided a new perspective, especially because this is a very individually handled web source, so I feel the only exposure I’ve had to journalism is my class and how a newspaper is run through my class, so it will be interesting to see how a news site like New Canaanite is actually running and see if there are any similarities or differences. And I also think this will broaden my horizons in a way where before I was writing about the art shows and things and today I’m writing an article about cemeteries and cleaning up cemeteries.

[Read Ambereen Sadiq’s first news story here.]