By Andres A. Navarro

There was one thing I did not expect to have to do during my internship: grunt work.

Nor did I expect that doing such work would teach me something about journalism.

I went into my internship believing I would be fighting for A-1 space with every story I wrote – and I’m sure other Chipster colleagues felt the same.

My editor, Jim, told me on my first day that I would be a general assignment reporter in North Orange County. Unlike the other reporters in the newsroom, I had no beat and no specific city to cover.

I honestly don’t remember my first assignment. It was either writing about a high school’s anniversary party or a high school senior’s perfect attendance record dating back to kindergarten.

What I remember is that when I was handed those assignments I thought: Why am I writing these stories? There can’t be people out there who care about them other than those who pitched them.

But I did my job. I reported the stories and wrote them to Jim’s satisfaction.

And so the weeks went. I wrote about a high school student’s perfect SAT test score, a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a bridge, car accidents, a parking lot, a Boy Scout camp, a new church and other stories. All the while I was thinking I could do better.

Then the topic of grunt work came up during our group discussion with my Chips Quinn career coach. It seems I was not the only one having issues with such work. The only difference was that most of my Chipster colleagues also had some freedom to work on their own story ideas in between the assignments.

Our coach suggested we do the best we could with our assignments until we established ourselves in the newsroom. Then we could pitch our own story ideas to our editors.

I felt I had established myself, so I came up with a few story ideas. I met with my editor to talk about this situation, which had been bothering me. I figured Jim would understand and free me a bit to work on my stories.

I was wrong.

He probably saw the disappointment in my face, so he explained why he didn’t think I should worry about my own story ideas just yet.

His words went something like this: “It’s not like I don’t think you can craft a good enterprise story. I think you don’t understand the reason for doing the work you’re doing. You only have 12 weeks here and I want to give you the experience that every beginning reporter goes through. I’m also doing this because this is how you fine-tune all those journalistic skills needed to get even better than you are already.”

Jim said we could talk the following day if I still wanted time to pursue my own ideas.

At home, I kept playing his words over and over, and by the end of the night I thought I understood. It wasn’t as though I was getting the assignments no one wanted or got around to. My summer was obviously something Jim had planned before I even showed up in the newsroom on June 1.

Since that day, I handled every assignment I was given as if it were meant to be an example of what I’m capable of.

By the end of my internship, I was confident enough to tackle the most complex topics given to me, including affordable housing plans discussed during an Anaheim City Council meeting and the city’s controversial $200,000 contract with the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce.

And there was another, final lesson: I learned that there is always someone out there who cares about the stories we consider to be grunt work.

There’s nothing better than getting that one phone call, with the caller telling you what a great story you wrote.

Andres Navarro was a Summer 2009 Chips Quinn Scholar at The Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif. A print-journalism graduate of the University of Arizona, he worked for a semester as a politics reporter for UA’s student paper, The Tombstone Epitaph, and was a features reporter/intern with the Tucson Citizen in summer 2008.