Weekday mornings, Arwa Gunja is up at 2:45 a.m. She jumps in the shower, gets dressed and by 2:55 a.m., she’s out the door. A short car ride later, she’s at the WNYC studios in downtown Manhattan — most days, she’s the first one there.

Gunja, a 2007 NYU graduate, is the line producer for WNYC’s early morning radio program “The Takeaway.” And though she thought her prospects for a journalism job after college were bleak, with hard work, dedication and a little bit of luck, Gunja is now running a nationally syndicated news show with an audience approaching one million. She readily admits it’s further than she imagined being just four short years ago. And though the hours are taxing on the young producer, she knows that news never sleeps.

The Last Line of Defense: The line producer job is really the last line of defense before the show goes on the air live. I’m looking at the entire show from a big picture viewpoint and seeing if what we have makes sense. The other job is to look at the individual segments and see if what we have is up-to-date, if the writing is where we want it to be and if the guest we’re putting on are who we want delivering our information.

Waking Up is Hard to Do: I try to go to bed at 7 to 8 p.m., and I make 9 p.m. the cutoff point. The other hard part of the shift is that your social life really takes a hit. But the way I’ve always viewed these shifts are when you work in journalism you’re working odd hours because things have to be fast, 24 hours a day. I guess I do see it as a sacrifice, but I also see it as a reality of this job and the type of industry I work in.

Playing the Game Right: I think if you want to be a journalist, and you live in a city like New York, it’s almost no excuse not to take advantage of all those elements and to make them work in your advantage. There should be no semester, no summer when you are not applying for everything that’s available in New York.

Getting Her Start: I think people get caught up in the idea that if you don’t work at the biggest places, then you aren’t making it. For me, I started working in really tiny places. My first internship was at the online magazine, the Gotham Gazette, which I’m sure no one has heard of, but it’s an incredible publication. My next internship was at a really small news magazine called The New York Resident. And then, I got an internship at NPR. But for me to get my internship at NPR all I had to do was intern at two very small places and do well. So I would say really intern anywhere, but while you’re there do a really great job. Don’t get caught up with names.

Her Takeaway: My one piece of advice is while it’s really important to know how to be a journalist, the most important thing is to be smart. What I mean when I say to be smart is to have some sort of expertise in something. I would say major in something else, minor in something else – it doesn’t matter what it is as long as you know it really, really well because that’s ultimately what you’re providing as a journalist. Sell yourself on that as much as you sell yourself on being a great journalist.