By MacKenzie Rogers, The Murray State News
During the summer of 2025, seven Murray State students found themselves at the Fort Knox Army Installation as interns for the Cadet Summer Training Public Affairs Office. The internship hosts 20-22 communications-focused students from across the country to spend the majority of the summer covering training events while telling the stories of Advanced and Basic Camp cadets.
It was during this summer that I, like my six peers, had the opportunity to step into the public affairs world. We have been bouncing between the field and the office, producing engaging content for the target audience: the families and friends of the cadets and the general public.
If there is a CST event taking place, then there is a big chance we are there, cameras and tripods ready to capture the moment. Using our knowledge of journalism and media production, we create video packages and photo galleries while simultaneously learning better techniques and methods to quickly turn-around content, maintaining quality along the way. A mixture of 25-50 photos, a feature article, a two-to-three minute video, a social media post, an Instagram reel: these are the things we do every single day, each product a reminder that we were selected for this.
We do more than just cover the events, we are given the chance to experience them first hand. We’ve rappelled off a 64-foot tower, crawled underneath live ammunition in the dark with only sparsely-fired flares to guide our way and entered tear-gas chambers where the masks are optional. How many people can say they’ve crawled through dense sand while machine guns fire overhead?
I have found myself running through the woods alongside cadets while unseen enemies shoot their guns while I raise my own weapons, a Canon R6 and my voice recorder, in return and once the smoke clears, I get the chance to speak with the cadets who are weeks, if not days, away from graduating, discovering what has led them to want to spend their days rucking miles-on-end while a PAO intern waves a camera (or two) in their face.
In the span of a few months, we have all grown, whether it is as journalists or people, each of us will be walking away stronger than we started. We all could have found an internship behind a desk, but instead, we are out in the woods, chasing our stories.
