Wyoming reveals majestic mountain peaks and a bubbling underground.

Three days and three states, from a spooky mining town and hippy enclave to a fossil-filled river gorge.

It looks like Will and I had similar ambitions for the summer: to breathe some fresh air, rediscover open space, and set out on a wind-blowing-through-our-hair car adventure to explore our own Western United States.

If ever I doubted the importance of connections in the media industry, I’m now a believer. I’m a week and a half from being back on the job market, and after months of sending out applications with little to no response, an opportunity may have reared its shiny head. I had a successful interview yesterday for an associate editor position at a magazine whose name I won’t mention as to not jinx myself. It ended with an invitation back next week to meet the publisher. Before jumping up and down and giving myself a big pat on the back, I need to pay credit where credit is due: to an editor.

It just so happens that this editor works at VIA (where I’m finishing up a six-month internship) and she’s a friend and former colleague of the editor-in-chief at this anonymous magazine. In fact, she’s a big part of why I applied to this magazine in the first place, and she was kind enough to phone the editor early on to sing my praises. This scenario reminds me a lot of my application process for VIA–where my former

For the past two and a half months, I’ve been interning at Via, AAA’s travel magazine for Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Alaska. On top of adding several new destinations to my travel list, I’ve already learned a lot about magazine production, from pitching and assigning stories through the various levels of editing, and I hope to share my discoveries over the next few months.

During my first few days of work, I learned that it’s nearly impossible for freelancers to get feature pitches accepted at Via (you have a better chance of getting accepted to Harvard). There are a number of reasons for this, including the magazine’s bi-monthly frequency and small size, the fact that editors map out feature stories as much as a year in advance, because the magazine has grown to depend on a group of tried-and-true veteran freelancers who are given regular assignments, and because it’s very rare that you and I have heard of a must-see destination that a travel magazine ed

A man’s voice sounded from inside the short white school bus. “Free tea!” the voice declared to the outside world passing by. Guisepi sat perched on a cooler, tending a kettle of tea. He looked so comfortable in his makeshift kitchen of storage tubs and wooden shelves that you could actually believe he had spent the last four years trekking up and down the West Coast serving free tea.

Jackie and I are bringing in the new year with a ladies road trip — Road Trip 20Fem as we’ve dubbed it– from Santa Cruz to Eureka, CA with two of our old roommates from San Diego. On day one, we already got into a muddy situation, literally, after we took a wrong turn trying to go kiwi picking at the Swanton Berry Farm U-Pick stand North of Santa Cruz off Hwy 1.

Now that my brain has stopped feeling like a fried egg, I’ll share more about my experience applying to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The application was pretty standard for the most part–an online application, three letters of rec, two transcripts, a resume, two personal statements, and NO GRE SCORES!

The toughest part for me was the personal statements, seeing that writing quality and the ability to make a compelling case in few words are weighted more heavily for a journalism program. The prompts were really vague and contradictory to the general graduate division instructions, so it took a while to desipher what I was even supposed to write about. It was only after going to an information session at the journalism school, that I learned that I should ignore the general prompts and focus only on what the J school tells me. However, this is what the J school site told me:

F-1: Statement of Purpose (750 word limit; explain why you are applying)
F-2: Personal History Statement (750 wo

Serena Renner recaps the events leading up to her decision to apply to UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for Fall 2010.

Got some extra time? Like to write? I just heard about a few opportunities for all you bloggers out there, which could help you gain experience and exposure while you’re in between jobs, freelancing or trying to figure out what to do with yourself.

Change.org is hiring full-time bloggers to write about social causes from human rights to environmental issues to social entrepreneurship. Best of all, positions are paid and your posts would be viewed by over a million users. Check out the ad here.

MediaBistro also recently launched a user-generated blog “We the ‘Bistro” which allows any one to submit posts via email to a large audience of fellow media professionals. You can submit photos, video or anything relevant to media workers. I just sent in an old Meridian post to the email address post@mediabistro.posterous.com just to get my name out there and see how it works.

I hope to open up Meridian in a similar fashion so that readers can email posts containing their work or musings on issues facing young