Just out of journalism school, Shannon Palus takes a public relations internship at a nuclear energy lab in Idaho.
Shannon Palus's writing has appeared in Slate, Discover, Popular Science, Retraction Watch, and many other publications. She's a staff writer at Wirecutter, a product review website owned by the New York Times Company.
This story originally aired on Oct. 6 2017 in an episode titled “Perception.”
Story Transcript
So when I was a senior in college I applied to maybe a dozen or so journalism internships at big outlets in big cities. Places like Slate, Scientific American, Popular Science, New Scientist, and I was rejected from every single one. I spent memorable afternoons crying in my bathtub. I was living in Montreal and studying physics and my hands were shaking and my heart was pounding, that feeling of being chased by a wild animal even though you're technically perfectly safe. I really wanted to be a writer and I felt like nobody else thought that I could do that.
I had vague plans to move back to Philadelphia and live in my parents’ attic and make a go of it as a freelancer, finding work on my own and submitting things on spec. That seemed kind of appealing but it just seems like it took a little bit more confidence than I had at the time.
So when a few days before my final final exam I found an internship position that had not yet found an intern, I took it. And at the beginning of June I was on a plane headed to Idaho Falls, Idaho, to work at a nuclear energy lab.
It was a public relations internship, which meant that I'd be writing press releases about human factors researchers designing better control rooms for dangerous things and prepping scientists for TV spots. I was going to talk about new kinds of fuel. And all of that sounded really interesting to me.
I like science. I’d studied physics. This stuff was cool, but I didn’t want to be doing PR. I didn’t want to be writing inevitably one-sided stories for an institution, and I didn’t want to be living in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to be in, like, New York or Boston or something.
But, overall, it just felt sort of more safe. It felt safe to say yes to this, to not have to strike it out on my own. And further, I'd be staying with a couple in Idaho, someone my mom knew from college, so I'd have like Idaho parents of sorts to take care of me and make sure I was all right.
My first day of work, I met my co-writing intern, Allie, who immediately put me at ease. She was wearing black, pointy high-heeled shoes and bright red lipstick and I was like, okay, right. Big cities do not have a monopoly on glamor.
And she just seemed so much more prepared for the world than I was. She told me that she had brought an entire extra suitcase with her to Idaho filled with gear for adventures, and she invited me on one that weekend.
That Saturday, she and Brad, whose name has been changed, picked me up in Brad’s car. Both of them had all this stuff, like backpacks with mesh so that you wouldn’t get sweaty and clips that clipped around your waist so, you know, the weight would be distributed. And in addition to hiking boots, sandals with webbing that you could also hike in, and sunscreen a first aid kit, and Brad had this water filter so we could drink from the stream.
My contribution to disaster preparedness was to bring a Kindle in case I got tired on the hike and had to sit down. I really liked the outdoors, but I'd spent the past five years indoors in Montreal studying and drinking beer.
So we drive to the trail head and recite our names into a guestbook so if anything happens the police can have a clue as to your last location, and we start walking.
There's one more danger in Idaho that we don’t really have in cities and that is bears. But Brad told us that probability is on your side. These things are pretty rare. Also, if you just talk and make noise, like be normal, they're more afraid of you than you are of them. So that’s what we did.
We had conversations about what we’d been studying at school and our hopes and dreams for this summer and beyond. And within a few miles of this hike, I've realized a new fundamental truth about the world, which is that Idaho is beautiful. Whoever does their PR, like the potatoes thing, it’s so much more than that.
The sky was big and gorgeous and there were small animals and trees. We had this trail mostly to ourselves. And I make it all six miles to the top of this mountain where there's this lake. It’s like Caribbean blue and a little island in the center. We take off our hiking shoes and we hold them and we wade out to the middle and we’re just basking in the sun. I feel like, okay, this wasn’t my first choice and I made this decision sort of out of fear, but it all worked out. It’s going to be awesome. Sometimes you don’t have to be like a brave person. I just felt so good.
And we hiked back and we make it back to the trail head and we’re still alive. We sign out of the guestbook and we drive to a campsite which, it turns out, is actually just like a little clearing in the woods. There's nobody else around.
We meet up with two other interns: a mechanical engineering intern, a nuclear engineering intern. The five of us cooked dinner on the fire. We watched the sunset. We put all of our food away because we’re responsible, and we fall asleep beneath the stars.
The next thing I remember is waking up to the sound of myself screaming. I was screaming. The mechanical engineer was screaming next to me. Next to her, the nuclear engineer was screaming. Brad had jumped out of his hammock and was in a defense stance, I think. I don't really know. I've never defended myself against anything. And he was going, “Huh-huh-huh. There was a bear.”
We didn’t get to the next step of what you're actually supposed to do once you see a bear. I was sitting there in my tent crawled up in a ball thinking about how my Idaho parents were going to have to call my biological parents and explain to them that I'd been mauled or watched someone be mauled. Allie was playing dead on the other site of the campsite but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know if that was the right thing to do anyway.
Eventually we all stop and Brad has whipped out his flashlight and is waving it around and he confirms to us that, yes, he has seen something but he doesn’t know where it went. This does not make me feel too much better so I sit there very still for as long as I can, and eventually I fall asleep because I’m so tired after hiking twelve miles after five years of being indoors.
When I wake up in the morning, I am so relieved to see sunlight. As I wiped the grogginess out of my eyes and think about how I’m going to get a cup of coffee out here, I realized something. I never actually saw a bear. Next to me, the mechanical engineer said she hasn’t seen a bear. Next to her, the nuclear engineer says he hadn’t seen a bear. Allie had thought there was an axe murderer that was after us, and Brad explains to us what he saw, which was nothing. He had been sleepwalking.
We had all been reacting to this thing that was happening in Brad’s head. It was just five of us sitting in the woods freaked out about nothing. It wasn’t how we were going to die, it wasn’t some phone call our parents were going to get, it was going to be an inside joke that would carry our friendship through the rest of the summer.
And it did. We went on weekend camping trips, we ate lunch together, we goofed off on trips to the nuclear reactor. I went home every day after work and hung out with my Idaho mom and my Idaho dad and drank wine and talked about science and it was awesome.
By August, the lab had offered me an extension on my internship and I had been applying to all those places, Popular Science, Nature, Smithsonian, rejection, rejection, rejection. And the lab offered to keep on through April with money, but I still really wanted to be a journalist. This time I didn’t want to say yes.
So at the end of August, Allie drove me to the Idaho Falls Airport and I got on a plane and I went to Philadelphia to an apartment where I was going to find a way to pay rent. I was going to have a desk in the corner and pitch stories and make things happen. I felt in my body just so afraid of that, so afraid that I was making the wrong decision, that my savings account was going to run out and my career was just going to plummet. But I knew the things that I’m afraid of sometimes are just in my head.