University of Guelph-Humber

Before the newspapers are delivered, the trains are running, or the sun has risen in the sky, Michelle Nelson is on her way to work. Each morning she’s up at 4:00am to be ready for 6:27, on the dot, when she makes her first TV appearance of the day.

Since she graduated from the University of Guelph-Humber’s Media Studies program in 2012, Michelle has been working in television news. She’s now a Video Journalist for the Weather Network, hosting a segment on their morning show and producing news pieces for their national channel. She’s up and working at an hour most of us have heard of, but never seen, and Michelle says she’s right where she wants to be. Ever since she was young, Michelle loved the news.

“I wanted to read it, watch it, follow it. I was a news junkie,” she says. “It was a bit of an obsession, but I always knew I wanted to work in TV news. When I was in high school, I’d read the morning announcements and volunteer at the local station.”

That single-minded drive made picking a university an easy decision. She read about UofGH’s offer of a degree and a diploma and the promise of practical experience, and her mind was made up.

“When I saw the program, I immediately thought it was great. You get to do a little bit of everything — public relations, journalism, image arts — and I was really excited about doing an internship. Getting hands-on experience like that is exactly what you need if you want a job in this field.”

Impatient to get to her internship, Michelle took the advice of one of her professors and reached out to a small TV station in her hometown of Peterborough. They liked the idea, so after she was finished with her third year of classes, Michelle went home for the summer and started interning at CHEX TV. There she put into practice what she’d been learning in the classroom and got plenty of on-the-job training.

“In terms of gaining experience and skills, that was the most important step I took for my career,” she says. “Within a week of being there, I was making stories for the night’s newscast.” Getting thrown into the mix so quickly meant there was a lot to learn, and fast.

“The thing I learned about most was simple: deadlines. I was writing and producing projects while at UofGH, but for those assignments they always give you time to think, prepare and get it all ready. When I started in TV, I needed to finish a story by 5 o’clock or else it wouldn’t make it to air,” Michelle says. “With that limit, I learned a lot about time management and solving problems on the fly.”

With the summer over and her internship done, Michelle wasn’t ready to leave TV. She decided to take a gamble, grouping all her classes early in the week and staying on at a job at CHEX TV for the rest of her time. After a year of driving and juggling responsibilities, Michelle had graduated and stepped into a fulltime job at CHEX as a news reporter.

She was now doing what she’d hoped to all along, but the reality of being a TV news reporter started to push up against her expectations.

“I wasn’t prepared for how emotionally attached I’d get to the stories and the people in them,” Michelle says. “One time I did a story about a person who’d been killed by a train, and there I was, talking to his mother, asking her how she felt. Every time I interviewed someone like that, I’d hug them after and sometimes I’d be crying too.”

Ready for a job that was less emotionally taxing, Michelle left CHEX for the Weather Network and she’s been there ever since. Waking up before the crack of dawn is crucial, because Michelle is in many ways a one-person team. Though she starts her day with a briefing from a meteorologist and does some filming with another journalist, most of her work is done alone.

After her appearance on the morning show, she loads up the cameras, tripods and batteries into the Weather Network van and heads out to shoot a story. For each segment she makes, Michelle is responsible for camerawork, lighting, audio, writing and editing the piece together for the end of the day.

“The industry has changed so much, even in the four years I’ve been working in it,” she says. “I used to just do the on-camera work, but now I do a bit of everything. You don’t know what to expect, and you won’t really know until you’re in the field.”

It’s for that reason that Michelle is taking part in UofGH’s new alumni mentoring program, which pairs up students with a grad working in their field. With her experience in TV, Michelle’s hoping to share what she knows with an aspiring reporter, someone who has the same drive and passion she did as a student.

“I wish we had something like this when I was in school,” she says. “We had people come in from CBC, CP24 and other places, but it’s nice to talk to someone and get personal advice to prepare you for what’s to come.”

Michelle says that in her field, technical know-how, time management and creativity are essential to success, skills she’d try to pass on to a mentee. The early rise, though, might be a tougher sell.