When I started working in the production department at KCTS 9 last November, I’d only been in Seattle for a few months. I still gave tourists incorrect directions from Pike Place Market, only dimly knew that the Space Needle was an exemplar of the Googie style of architecture, and thought that Capitol Hill was probably in Olympia.

Since then, I’ve met Chris Gregoire (after screening calls for her live call-in show “Ask the Governor”); shaken hands with Knute Berger (Seattle Magazine, crosscut.com) at a John Muir impersonation event at Town Hall; helped interview the president of UW, Mark Emmert; rode on the Bainbridge Island ferry with Joel Connelly (Seattle P-I); watched Pacific Northwest Ballet’s The Nutcracker from the wings at McCaw Hall; and woken up at 6 a.m. to go on a shoot with the legendary filmmakers Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan—and watched from backstage at Benaroya when both of them spoke there the following night.

I’ve blogged about John Updike, higher education budgets, the Seattle International Film Festival, several local plays, NPR host Scott Simon, green architecture, the Frye Art Museum, and the 2009 Environmental Priorities. I’ve used my PBS press pass for legitimate and a few admittedly “off-label” purposes. And I’ll hold my breath this Saturday, as a whole crop of KCTS producers attend the Northwest Regional Emmy Awards, where they’ve been nominated for more than a dozen awards.

What would the city be like without KCTS? Or, more broadly, what would the United States be like without PBS stations in all its great cities? It’s painful to imagine, an uninterrupted landscape of apocalyptic visions and dystopian dreams—a place in which insipid ensemble comedies, weather reports, car crashes, and mindless reality television slowly erode the painfully few brain cells we have left. PBS isn’t always heart-racing, pulse-threading action, but it is thoughtful and it is forward-looking—characteristics that are rare in any place or age.

While my formal instruction as a student is certainly nearing its end, and my time as an intern at KCTS concludes this afternoon, I feel pleased to say that my education in topics national and local will continue into the foreseeable (and unforeseeable) future through PBS. There are many ways to get to know a place—a city, a country, a planet—and I write now to report, with a completely unrepentant tinge of nostalgia and gratitude, that KCTS has been mine.