Q&A: Sophie Weitz, Digital events fellow @ Government Executive

Each year, Atlantic Media hires around 40 recent graduates for its fellowship program. Fellows are placed in editorial or business positions across Atlantic Media’s four brands: The Atlantic, National Journal, Government Executive, and Quartz.

Tell us about what you do.

I’m the digital events fellow for Government Executive. We do webcasts, viewcasts, and live streams for all of the Gov Exec brands, which includes Route Fifty for state and local news, NextGov for tech news, Defense One for defense news, and then Government Executive for government news.

Webcasts are slide-based presentations (with little heads of people on their webcams), and all of these have government speakers. So if the topic is “Data Analytics,” we’ll get government speakers who are doing an initiative about revamping data analysis at their agency, for example, and they’ll each talk about what they’re doing. Viewcasts are panel discussions that we film here, and then live streams are live events that we stream out.

What were you working on before you came up here?

Right before this, we were in a prep meeting for a webcast that we have coming up about data analytics, actually. It’s a big topic, so a lot of them are about data analytics. We were just talking with our team doing logistics and content for it, and going over what kind of topics we want to talk about, who the two government speakers are going to be, and just general goals and run-of-show for the webcast.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve gotten to work on during the fellowship?

We had a big festival, called “Fedstival” (because you know, federal government). That was really exhausting, but really cool. We had a full week of a lot of panel discussions on all different topics that are big in federal government right now.

There was one day that was all about citizen experience and what government can do to make things easier for citizens. There was this woman who flies planes through hurricanes to gather data on them. That was a pretty solid week of events with lots of interesting speakers.

What led you to the fellowship?

All of my education experience is in economics (and a little bit of political science), but all of my work experience is in film and media. So I was trying to find a job that could leverage both of those things, because I wanted to do something creative, but also I had never had a job that was actually related to my major. So I thought I’d like to do something more with econ or something with more real world application.

I saw this fellowship and it seemed like it would be a good opportunity to combine everything. When I applied, the application was pretty general, but then they got back to me and asked me to interview for this position, which was digital events. I did not know at all what that meant. So I definitely asked about that in the interview, and then I understood a little bit more, but I was still like, I don’t know what this is, but sounds great.

It was definitely my top job that I wanted and it was the first one I heard back from, so I was like, yes, I want to do this! I also wanted to try living somewhere new. I’m from LA and I went to school in St. Louis and had been thinking about where else I could go. I thought it was cool that it was in a new city.

What’s your dream job?

I don’t know, it changes every day!

What about when you were a kid?

Even then, I had like five. As a kid, I wanted to be every job except firefighter and police officer, because I thought those were the only dangerous jobs.

What about professionally?

I still would really like to do a job as an economist, which, even after majoring in econ, I still haven’t done anything related to that. But I think it would be really cool to get some more experience doing economic analysis, because I did a little bit in school and I would like to try that out.

Or I would like to do something more in a creative route. For a while I wanted to be a Director of Photography, but I sort of flip flop between those two things. I guess right now, I would really like to try a job as an economist.

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given you?

A piece of advice I like is something my dad tells me a lot, which is, don’t be afraid to reach out to people. Most people like to help out and the worst that can happen is they say no.

What advice would you give to people seeking entry level jobs in media?

I would say apply to things, even if you don’t have a clear idea of where it’ll end up. When I applied to this, it was so general, and I could end up really anywhere in any of these different brands doing any type of fellowship, and I ended up doing something I’ve never done before. I’ve never done anything events related. Best case you end up doing exactly what you wanted, or else you end up trying something totally new that you’d never even heard of.