My Improbable Route to Journalism

My Improbable Route to Journalism

If you had known me three years ago, you would have never thought that I would choose to study journalism in college. Throughout high school and college, writing was always a chore and oftentimes an ordeal. However, that changed when I learned about all the opportunities a self-proclaimed computer nerd like me had in this rapidly evolving field. I was hired as The Eagle’s assistant Web editor in September of 2007, after seeing a job posting in Today@AU. Soon after, I started taking story assignments from the paper’s metro/national news desk. I was hooked. By the end of the 2007-2008 academic year, I was promoted to Web editor at The Eagle. I interned at mediabistro.com during the summer of 2008, copy editing feature stories, writing headlines as well as the occasional blog post. For the spring semester of 2009, I was hired as an intern in the politics section of washingtonpost.com -- something I consider to be my proudest career achievement to date. So far, I have enjoyed every minute of my internship at the Post.

I take great pride in my work and am a detail-oriented person. This is evident in the fact that only one of my approximately 30 articles for The Eagle has been corrected. I like to take initiative and I love the creativity that I am afforded as a journalist – especially when I plan enterprise work. “Ethan is one of the hardest working individuals I know on campus, and a person that I can always count on,” Johnny Concepcion, a sophomore at AU, says.

I’m originally from Rye Brook, N.Y., a small, suburban bedroom community in Westchester County. Both my parents work in marketing, and my dad studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, so I guess I am somewhat following in his footsteps. I have one sister; she’ll be 16 years old at the end of the week. Both my parents are proud of my achievements, but they’re also scratching their heads, still wondering how I ended up majoring in journalism.