2006 Interns
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Marc Carig University of Nevado at Reno Reporter, Sports A few days before I officially landed this gig,
an editor at the paper gave me a ring.
He sounded a bit confused. |
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Lenore Cho Three things have colored me: I grew up in New Orleans, I go to an all-women’s college and I’m equally passionate about politics and sports. But journalism always defined me. I got my start in journalism as a high school summer intern at my hometown paper, the Times-Picayune, in 2000, and later worked for three years as a staff writer and copy editor for the Sophian, the weekly student newspaper at Smith College. I got hooked on copy editing as an intern at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass. (fall 2003), and did other internships at the Times-Picayune (summer 2004) and the Boston Globe (summer 2005). Since October, I have served as an assistant editor at ESPN.com in Bristol, Conn. In addition to sports, I also worked in the press office of Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign in Washington (fall 2004) and interned in the offices of Sens. Mary Landrieu and Kerry. I speak French and Korean and expect to receive a bachelor’s degree in government and history from Smith in May. |
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Amanda Edwards Copy Editor, Metro University of Nebraska at Lincoln Shalom! I hail from Nebraska, and I interned with the Denver Post last summer as a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund intern. I have worked at the Daily Nebraskan, my university’s independent daily, for nearly four years as a copy editor, copy chief and now slot editor. I am working on my senior honors thesis, which consists of editing stories – one on the Platte River and one on the Sri Lanka tsunami – for two in-depth-report magazines and putting together a working model of how best to execute such reports in the future. When I’m not spending my Saturdays at the journalism college, I’m attempting to keep up with my biblical Hebrew studies. My eventual goal is to translate Hebrew texts. I’ve gotten involved in the local slam poetry scene, which has given me an interesting look at literary art in a performance setting. I’ll be graduating in May with a bachelor’s in journalism, and I’d like to end with the phrase that got me where I am today: “Copy editing is the essence of my being.” |
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Jeffrey Ghassemi Reporter, Health University of California at Irvine The badge on my truncated white coat reads “Student Physician,” a euphemism for “Medical Student,” which some may say is really a euphemism for “Student Masochist.” As a first-year student at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, I can say that med school isn’t that bad and that the perks are great: celebrity status in the school library, Sunday nights with “Gray’s Anatomy” (the book, not the TV show) and a first-name relationship with every barista in town. Before med school, I spent six years at the University of California at Los Angeles, where I earned my BA in political science and master’s in public health. I became increasingly interested in journalism, however, after witnessing the growing challenges to responsible health reporting. I served as a columnist for the Science & Health Section of The Daily Bruin and covered the ever-contentious stem cell debate in Washington, D.C., as an intern for the National Health Council. I’ve also published in both medical and social science journals, using print media as a means of interpreting health information for the public. I guess that makes me a “Student Physician-Journalist.” |
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Mark Gong Photographer University of Maryland I was definitely interested in taking great photos long before I was interested in journalism. The more I took pictures, the more I wanted to poke my nose into stranger and darker places. That’s how I got into photojournalism. It gave me a reason to explore the lives of strangers and tell their stories. Sometimes it’s fun; sometimes it’s not, but it is always interesting. I grew up in Beijing, China, where most of my family still live, and I immigrated to the States at age 9. I applied to the Diamondback, my college newspaper, and found like-minded photographers who shared my passion for storytelling and picture-taking. Since then, I’ve done freelance work in the United States and abroad. I will graduate from the University of Maryland in May. My other passions include traveling, salsa dancing and learning new languages. Two years ago, I thought I was destined for a life of cubicles and computers. Now, I know that as long as I have a camera and my curiosity, no walls can hold me back. |
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Philip Gray Copy Editor, National and Foreign Wichita State University For one of my first journalism classes, Opinion Writing, I was asked to write an editorial about necrotizing fasciitis, “flesh-eating bacteria.” It began, “Dunk your babies in Clorox!” (My professor declined to grade it because it was “so completely inappropriate.”) From this story, you can learn at least a couple of things about me: that leads are important to me and that I can tolerate an exclamation point now and again. I am from Kansas and will graduate in May from Wichita State University. My first copy-editing position was at my high school paper. I also wrote and edited for my college paper and wrote for a small-town weekly. Since 2002, I have worked as a copy editor at the Wichita Eagle. I’ve taken six months off: three in the summer of 2003 for a Dow Jones internship at the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and three in the summer of 2005 for an internship at the Dallas Morning News. |
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Megan Greenwell Reporter, City Desk Barnard College, Columbia University As a 15-year-old reporter for my high school newspaper, I stumbled upon an indentured-servitude ring that eventually landed three people in jail. The Berkeley High Jacket became the first nonprofessional winner of the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists’ Journalist of the Year award because of that story. But more importantly, that story got me addicted to the adrenaline rush of getting a scoop. The same year, I got to cover the arson that burned down a third of our school, and I became fluent in Spanish after living for three months in Nicaragua. My parents, a flooring contractor and an Episcopal priest, moved our family to 13 houses in five metropolitan areas in Oregon and California, but I still consider myself “from” Berkeley. I was recruited to Columbia as a foil fencer and helped the team win the 2003 Ivy League championship before leaving the team to work full-time for the Columbia Daily Spectator. I served as the news editor and editor in chief of the newspaper, launching new weekly sports and entertainment sections, and a weekly Spanish supplement that made Spec the first bilingual college daily in the country. After my freshman year, I covered everything from Green Party politics to a 24-hour hostage standoff for the Berkeley Daily Planet. Since then, I’ve worked at the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Blade in Toledo, Ohio. I’m a baseball fanatic still waiting for the day that my beloved Oakland A’s win the World Series again. |
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Kim Hart Reporter, Financial University of Maryland This spring, I was assistant editor for a bureau of the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., which is where I grew up. Last year, I was an intern in the Baltimore Sun’s features department and wrote for American Journalism Review. In the fall, I covered health issues and the Maryland General Assembly for Capital News Service, a wire service run by the University of Maryland. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I was on the staff of the student newspaper, the Independent Florida Alligator, and freelanced for the Gainesville Sun. I studied marketing and literature in London three summers ago. I graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism, and I received a master’s in journalism from the University of Maryland in December. |
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Bravetta Hassell Reporter, Style Hampton University Since early adolescence, I have made it a point to be the one asking all the questions. Some may call me nosy, but after years of study and practice, I call myself a journalist. I worked last summer as an intern reporter at the Knoxville News Sentinel. In the spring of 2005, I attended the New York Times Student Journalism Institute in New Orleans. The previous summer, I participated in the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire Short Course in Washington, D.C., then worked as an intern at the Washington Afro American newspaper. I served as editor in chief of the student newspaper at Hampton University, the Hampton Script, for the fall 2005 semester. I’m a volunteer at a local preschool and a freelance writer for the Black College Wire. I have a huge interest in social issues that affect young adults. I expect to graduate from Hampton in May 2007. |
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Caroline Hauser Copy Editor, Style and Financial University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I joined my school newspaper as a sophomore at Davidson College. The first week, I learned how to use PageMaker and a Mac. The second week, I wrote the lead coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks. I was hooked. I went on to serve as sports editor, news editor and managing editor and got an English degree in my spare time. After college, I did a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund copy editing internship at the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph before starting graduate school as a Park Fellow at the University of North Carolina, where I expect to receive a master’s degree in journalism in May. This past summer, I worked on the copy desk of the Oregonian, which is 2,859 miles from my hometown of Mocksville, N.C. My most recent accomplishments include catching 38 pounds of beads at Mardi Gras and watching every episode of “Designing Women.” Oh, one more thing: I like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. |
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Melanie Ho Reporter, Sports University of Ottawa It’s the little things that get you caught. Sometimes, I’m still tempted to throw a “u” in “color” or “favorite.” Other days, I want to say that I’m driving 100 kilometres — not 65 miles — per hour. And then there’s the unforgivable “eh?” I’m determined to lose that. I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Living just across the border from Quebec, I learned to speak both French and English. Later, in my junior year in high school (or, as we say, grade eleven), I moved to a small town in Italy, where I learned Italian. I continued to study Italian and in April I graduated from the University of Ottawa with a degree in communications and Italian. Throughout university I worked at the Fulcrum, my school’s English-language campus weekly, where I wrote and edited the sports section. In the summer of 2005, I interned at the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal. Living in the States has taught me a lot that watching Detroit’s 6 o’clock news (which I catch regularly in Canada) can’t. For instance, how to enjoy a Fourth of July holiday, eat Funions and measure gas in gallons, not litres. I still haven’t grasped Fahrenheit. |
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Adam Kilgore Reporter, Sports Syracuse University I grew up in York, Maine, a small seaside town about an hour north of Boston. Sports dominated my youth, hours of playing touch football at the field down the street or spending all weekend on the couch watching the Red Sox or Patriots. When a few teachers told me in the seventh grade that I had a knack for writing, I started telling my parents I was going to write for Sports Illustrated one day. I started working toward that goal in high school, when I became the first sports reporter at the York Independent. I worked there until college, when I started writing for the Daily Orange at Syracuse University. I became an assistant sports editor my freshman year and sports editor the year after. The past two summers, I worked as a sports intern at the Boston Globe. In between, I worked as a stringer for the Portland Press Herald and contributed to Sports Illustrated On Campus. I expect to graduate from Syracuse in May. |
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Chris Kirkham Reporter, Financial Northwestern University Of all the characteristics needed to be a good journalist, one stands out in my mind: a complete and utter lack of a sense of self-preservation. As the last summer intern still working at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans last summer, I disregarded the pleas of friends and family and stayed on to cover Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. During my final term as a Northwestern University undergraduate last spring, I spent most of my time scouring the streets of Gary, Ind., to investigate a possible wrongful murder conviction. Sources for our project in the one-time murder capital of America included well-known drug dealers and would-be murderers. I grew up in suburban Houston, and ever since fancying Clark Kent more than Superman as a young comic book reader, reporting has been a way of life. As an undergraduate at Northwestern, I worked as a reporter and editor at the Daily Northwestern. That led me to internships at the Galveston Daily News in Texas, the Birmingham News in Alabama, the Miami Herald and the Times-Picayune. I’m finishing a year of graduate work at Northwestern, where I have spent most of my time in Washington covering Congress. |
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Sara Klieger Assistant News Editor, News Desk Northwestern University I am a Miami native who chose to study journalism and Spanish at Northwestern University near Chicago, where, among other things, I learned how to wear two pairs of pants at once during the winter. I’m a 2006 graduate of Northwestern. In the winter of 2005, I interned at my hometown paper, the Miami Herald, where I designed pages for the news, metro, features and sports departments. I spent the summer of 2004 at Crain’s Chicago Business, a weekly publication. At school, I worked for the Daily Northwestern for two years, and I served as the design editor in the fall of 2004. I was president of our student chapter of the Society for News Design during my senior year, and I also spent that year designing for nuViews, a student-created campus magazine. |
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Nick Miroff Reporter, Prince William County Bureau University of California at Berkeley In 1997, when I was 20 years old, I took a leave of absence from college and boarded a flight to Guatemala City. I’d grown up in Albany, N.Y., and before then, my entire experience of foreign travel had consisted of a fifth-grade field trip to Montreal. Over the next 10 months, I traveled through Central and South America — on buses, freighters and donkey carts. I learned Spanish. I took pictures and notes and wrote down everything. It was my introduction to journalism, and even today, it’s still what I love most about reporting — meeting new people, being observant, navigating through unfamiliar places. After earning a BA in literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2000, I returned to Latin America and became a correspondent for World Press Review magazine. Since then I’ve worked in Cuba, Chile and Mexico and reported for National Public Radio, Frontline/World, Mother Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sporting News. As an intern at the Oakland Tribune last summer, I wrote about everything from crime to immigration to the seagulls nesting on the roof of the public library. In May, I’ll earn an MJ degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley. |
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Adriane Quinlan Reporter, Style Yale University As a D.C. native interning for the New York Observer last summer, I felt nauseatingly self-conscious unsheathing my laminated Manhattan subway map to find the trendy parties I was expected to cover for the nightlife section. I spent the entire summer miscalling the West Side’s 1/2/3 train the “Red Line” after the D.C. Metro route that links my house near the Friendship Heights stop to my high school at Tenleytown, Georgetown Day School. By senior year in high school, I was editing the features section of The Argur Bit, the student newspaper. At Yale, I became a staff writer for the Arts & Entertainment section of the alternative weekly, the Yale Herald, in 2003 and served as editor last year. I currently serve as editor in chief for Yale’s creative newsmagazine, the New Journal, and I expect to graduate in May 2007. This year, I won second prize in the Atlantic Monthly’s Student Writing Contest for a New Journal article on corpse dissection at Yale Medical, a gruesome process I once explained to a socialite scarfing parfait at a Waldorf-Astoria gala I was covering for the Observer. Later that night, she pointed me toward 50th Street and explained that, though she always took a car, she thought there might be a 1/2/3 stop there. |
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Shearon Roberts Reporter, Howard County Bureau Louisiana State University Journalism clicked for me when I realized I could combine my favorite personality traits: reading, talking, debating politics, arguing, writing, documenting history and busying myself to the point of fulfilled exhaustion. In the spring of 2006, I worked as an intern at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau as part of the Washington Politics & Journalism semester, writing about foreign policy and politics, including a story about my native country, Trinidad and Tobago. During the summer of 2005, I was an intern at the Times- Picayune in New Orleans, and toward the end of my time there saw firsthand the true devastation that Hurricane Katrina had on the paper and the city. The previous summer, I worked as a copy editing intern at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. As a sophomore, I served as editor in chief of the Courtbouillon, Dillard University’s student newspaper. In 2005, after three years at Dillard, I graduated as valedictorian and enrolled in Louisiana State University’s graduate journalism program last fall. |
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Philip Rucker Reporter, Southern Maryland Bureau Yale University I am returning to The Washington Post for my second summer internship. In summer 2005, I worked as a Metro reporting intern in Prince George’s County. As an undergraduate at Yale, I freelanced for the New York Times and conducted research for the Times’s coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign. I was a reporting intern in the summer of 2004 for the city desk of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, helping cover the City Hall beat. I covered the academics beat for the Yale Daily News, and later served as news editor. A history major, I participated in Yale’s prestigious graduate leadership seminar on “Grand Strategy.” I was born in New York City but grew up in Southern California, where I trained as a competitive figure skater. At age 16, I moved to Savannah, Ga., where I wrote for SAVVY, the teen section of the Savannah Morning News, and graduated high school as valedictorian. Outside of journalism, I have held internships in Congress, at the Savannah Chamber of Commerce, at a law firm, in a judge’s chambers and in the communications department of a major corporation. I am conversational in Spanish and expect to graduate in May. |
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Robert Samuels Reporter, City Desk Northwestern University As a Bronx, New York, native, I chose journalism because it gave me the chance to do all the things my parents told me not to do: talk to strangers, go to scary places and ask lots of silly questions. I come to The Washington Post with this enterprising attitude after I graduate from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in June. At NU, I served as editor in chief of BlackBoard Magazine, the university’s black student magazine, and the Daily Northwestern, the campus newspaper. I’ve had some great journalistic experiences over the past four years, but a few disappointments, too. While working at the Roanoke (Va.) Times, I couldn’t master a Southern accent. Then I went to the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times — didn’t even get a tan. I worked at the Detroit Free Press last summer, but never ran into a popular Motown entertainer. Still, these times brought some success. I’ve received seven honors from the Hearst College Journalism program, including the national best reporting technique award in 2005. The Scripps Howard Foundation also named me one of the country’s top 10 college journalists. In my spare time, I try to learn Mandarin Chinese and dream of being a figure-skating reporter. |
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Marianne Seregi Graphic Artist, News Art Northwestern University As a visual journalist, I have explored all types of news and worked for various publications. I am the art director for Abroad View Magazine, a nationally distributed publication on global education. Last summer, I interned at the Charlotte Observer, where I worked primarily in news design. The summer before, I was an intern at Stars and Stripes, designing for the entertainment section. During my freshman and sophomore years, I designed for the Daily Northwestern in the entertainment and sports sections. When I’m not designing or studying, I’m working for Assistant Prof. Susan Mango Curtis, helping her students with layouts and tutoring them in such computer programs as Adobe Photoshop and QuarkXPress. I am also a member of the Society for News Design. I have studied French for nine years and expect to graduate in June 2007 with a bachelor’s of science in journalism. I am originally from Overland Park, Kan. |
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Sandhya Somashekhar Reporter, Loudoun County Bureau University of California at Berkeley I received a master’s degree in journalism in May 2006 from the University of California at Berkeley, where I spent two years studying Hindi, honing my journalism skills and consuming much wine and cheese with my professors. Between snacks, I managed to get published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. I also traveled twice to South Asia, including a trip to Bangladesh to report on global warming for Salon.com and the public radio program “Living on Earth.” Before graduate school, I covered education for the Argus, a daily newspaper in Fremont, Calif., where I received three awards for my writing. Prior to my California adventure, I worked at two small weeklies in the Washington area – the Gazette and the Prince George’s Sentinel. I went to high school in Bel Air, Md., and graduated in 1999 from the University of Maryland. While in college, I was a DJ at the campus radio station, WMUC-FM, where I spun “indie pop” and Bollywood hits. This will be my second summer at The Post, and while I am thrilled to be back in the trenches, I sure will miss the wine and cheese. |
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Stephen Stromberg Writer, Editorial University of Oxford I am a native of Los Angeles with a penchant for opinion writing and moving around. I majored in Russian studies at Harvard, where I was the editorial chair, responsible for writing and editing daily editorials and overseeing the daily production of the opinion section of the Crimson, the student newspaper. I also was a cartoonist and columnist for the paper. I wrote unsigned editorials for the Los Angeles Times’s editorial page in 2002 and reported from the Democratic National Convention with the political unit of the Times in 2004. I also worked as a writer-researcher for the Times Sunday Current section. I covered the 2004 presidential election for Salon.com, for which I now freelance. I am enrolled in a two-year master’s program in international relations at the University of Oxford, where I am executive editor of the Oxonian Review of Books and occasionally tend the student pub. |
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