N3RD AL3RT_

You must have, should have read about my visit to CNN in the previous post. Well, we finished off by exchanging cards, no wait, not exchanging, she gave hers. We exited the office in awe, thinking wow, that was damn easy So, while getting down the lift, we stopped on the 3rd floor randomly because of the colorful direction boards and company names. We came across many like Cybertronix, 7 Cube etc, but none were open, so we decided to visit Geo Channel. Half of the whole floor was theirs, nice.

We entered the office, no receptionist. We introduced ourselves to a guy next to the recep. and asked if someone could show us around. He looked puzzled which was understandable considering how many barge in like this - he asked us to talk to a guy sitting behind us. He was the broadcasting Station Head; Mr. Imran Meer. Well, Geo TV is Pakistan’s premiere news and entertainment channel like ARY and local PTV group. He gave a huge smile and said, “So, you guys are students? Want to have a look around?”. We were all wide faced smilie-lookin. He took us to the News station area where they receive feeds from all over the world from other stations and journalists or Routers, AFP, AP etc. The edit all that, translations, voiceovers, etc and give it to the area where its put in line with the anchor talking about all that stuff, the studio where the anchor sits (Hamid Mir). well, just for your information they all use apple Mac’s there, not a single Wondooz based PC for the technical work. Though some employees had 2 pcs, one Mac the other an Intel machine.

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Last week a friend of mine, an old family friend, landed here in Dubai, Emirates. His name, Aamir Mansoor Trambu, a final year student of journalism, mumbai. We had our friendly exchange of life stories and usual recording of random video clips for our own music video (he wanted to showoff what he learned at the school of journalism and I wanted to showoff my Adobe After Effects skills). By the end of the day, suddenly, we decided to do something I had always wanted to for a long time. Visit random companies and pester them with a million questions about their work (and ofcourse learn at the same time, while keeping their irritation at a minimum). So we decided to head to CNN at Dubai Media City.

Now before I talk about the visit, I want to get something off my chest. Generally students, as far as I know in my college, think its not possible to get companies to show them around. This might be from the fact that our college professors never encourage us nor tell us how to go about requesting companies to do that and, sharing the blame, the students themselves are never interested. Very few students have tried it (successfully, but never shared their experience which I dont understand why not) and very few professors have told us to do so (these few professors are the reason I am still interested in engineering For sure, if you try it the right way, companies would love to show you around as long as you truthfully tell them why you are there.

Moving on; I called 119 (Information services) and asked for CNN’s number. They didn’t have CNN listed, weird. Anyway, I know every group here has a website, like Media City (News.TV.Publishing.Magazines.Events), Internet City (Software.CorporateSolutions.TelephoneOps.ISPs), Knowledge Village (Institutes.Training.Colleges.otherCompanies) and Academic city, Biodubai, Silicon Oasis and so on. We got CNN’s number and Aamir called them up. The operator directly transfered the call to a sweet lady, Miss Samia (Initially he got confused and asked if we wanted to drop in our CV, I wish!). Samia asked us to meet the next day (14th Nov) at 12 pm. Wow, we could not believe it. CNN is just a call away!

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