How a business journalism career got its start

Mina Kimes: The thing that was interesting to me, was that I was offered a job as a business journalist or actually more accurately an internship. When I was in college, I only really had two concrete aspirations. One was to be a writer in some capacity, and the other was to not spend a summer at home in Arizona. I was very lucky to get placed in the then-timing internship program, where they put you at a magazine. I was interested in sports, I was interested in music, arts. Time, Sports Illustrated, these sexy titles. I got a placement magazine called Fortune Small Business. I would say my reaction was quizzical at the time, in college I had not studied business in any way, I’d not taken economics, I knew nothing about business, forget small business. But I did accept the internship, of course, and ended up having a really illuminating summer. It was a fantastic internship. I think in part because it was a smaller magazine, so I was given more to do. I learned a lot about not just business and entrepreneurship, which is the focus of that magazine, but just reporting. When they offered me a job as a reporter there after college, I was thrilled and started there as soon as I graduated.