Media and information senior Olivia Dimmer began her junior year at Michigan State University as the editor-in-chief of The State News. The following summer, she interned for the metro desk at the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Now, almost a full semester into her senior year, she is working as a correspondent for USA TODAY. To say her journalism career has already taken off would be an understatement. Dimmer said it’s the skills she learned in journalism classes and at The State News that helped her to achieve success.
“Going from The State News to The Sun Sentinel, I was going in comfortable with what I knew how to do,” Dimmer said. “I knew what my editors wanted from me, they wouldn’t have to ask every time. I got used to predicting what they wanted from my previous experience.”
At the Sun Sentinel, Dimmer covered topics such as a local Hillary Clinton rally, city council issues and various breaking news and feature stories.
“My favorite thing to cover was the Hillary Clinton rally, because it was the day after the Debbie Wasserman Schultz WikiLeaks scandal, so the energy was really high,” Dimmer said. “I also got to shoot my own photo and video.”
Through pursuing a minor in documentary filmmaking, Dimmer has acquired a wide variety of experience with shooting multimedia for publications, which has helped her to become a valuable reporter to have in the field.
Dimmer also interned at MLive in Jackson the summer after her sophomore year. She said it was digital first and very fast paced. She would shoot video on her phone, which gave her a lot of freedom to write about almost any topic she wanted to cover. Transitioning to a large metro newspaper in Florida, like the Sun Sentinel, was much more structured. She would get two or three rounds of edits, which helped her to learn the expectations of the publication and improve her writing.
“I got to branch out and try new things, such as write longer form stories,” Dimmer said. “My stories were on the front page four or five times, which was really cool.”
She arrived in Fort Lauderdale when the Zika Virus was gaining momentum as an issue in the United States, so she got to cover the ongoing efforts to prevent the spread of the virus. Her highest profile source was Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair that was ousted after the WikiLeaks email scandal.
There are two MSU alumni at the Sun Sentinel that also worked at The State News during their time as students. Dimmer said it was great to work and learn from fellow Spartans and help each other out.
One of the former Spartans at the Sun Sentinel is a cops reporter. She was a great mentor to Dimmer, who said she wants to cover crime news. Dimmer thought working in a large city in south Florida would be a good place to learn about these topics. She was placed on a lot of cop shifts at the Sun Sentinel, which she loved.
She also learned a lot about culture while working full time in Fort Lauderdale.
“South Florida has a very high population of Latinos, so the Latin culture is so vibrant and different from Fenton, where I am from,” Dimmer said. “I got to experience the food and see what life is like. I got to learn about different cultures.”
Dimmer’s advice to other students is to not be afraid to go after what you want.
“You have to work for it,” Dimmer said. “I had an internship before I came to MSU, I worked for The State News and I was always trying to find learning opportunities. Never stop reaching; never stop working. If you put in the work, everything will work out. Join The State News; the people I met there were invaluable to my experiences.”
Dimmer said her mother’s dream was for her daughter to go to college.
“I get to live out my dream and the dream my mother had for me,” Dimmer said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do the internship this summer without the scholarship (Financial Internship Award) I received from ComArtSci. I was able to focus on what I needed to focus on this summer; it would have been way more stressful.”
By Meg Dedyne
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