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 | Meredith Bowen
I’m finishing up my junior year at Syracuse University, where I study magazine journalism and chemistry. I used to want to be an orthodontist, but I realized in high school that going to orthodontic school would mean seven years of highly focused education, while going into journalism would mean a lifetime of learning about anything I wanted. I’ve interned at the Newark Star-Ledger doing graphics and page design and covered local government as a stringer for the Easton (Pa.) Express-Times. I also spent two years as a news editor and design editor at my college paper, the Daily Orange. I spent spring 2007 studying in London (where I lived in a neighborhood with more signs in Arabic than English) and traveling in Europe. During this time, I realized that unless I get a job working the science section at a newspaper, the most use I’ll get out of three years of advanced chemistry labs will be helping my friends figure out how to cook using the centigrade scale and milliliters. I collected newspapers and maps from every city I visited, and (much to my roommate’s horror) plan to make frames for them and call it the art for our living room next year. | ||||
 | Katie Carrera
I grew up in Greensburg, Pa., a quintessential suburban town roughly half an hour east of Pittsburgh where my chemical engineer parents passed on a knack for problem solving and a love of sports. I started writing sports in high school and continued as a freshman in college at the Post, Ohio University’s independent, student-run newspaper. This year, as a junior, I was sports editor as the following news surfaced: 19 Ohio football players were arrested in six months and received minimal punishment from their coach; the Ohio athletic department opted to cut four sports; and a soccer player fell five stories to her death while on spring break. I covered the Orioles, the Ravens and motocrosser Travis Pastrana during my first internship last summer as a sports reporter at The Baltimore Sun. While I enjoy all sports, hockey is by far my favorite. I drink excessive amounts of coffee, too, even in the summer. | ||||
 | Ashlee Clark
My parents didn’t care what I wanted to be when I grew up — as long as it didn’t involve hot combs and hairspray. The two have been hairdressers for more than 20 years. Don’t be like us, they said. You’ll be on your feet all day, listening to other people’s problems. So I did what any rebellious child would do — I picked a career that revolves around listening to the problems of others. I enrolled as a news/editorial journalism major at Western Kentucky University. I wrote two news stories for my college newspaper, the College Heights Herald, before classes had started. The storytelling had me hooked. I worked at the paper for four years, one of those years as editor-in-chief. Along the way, I added sociology as a second major and spent two weeks in England studying British media practices and figuring out why fish and chips come with peas. During the summer breaks, I interned at the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press, the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. The internships allowed me to interview disgruntled neighbors who wanted an end to carnies setting up camp near their homes, a refugee family trying to figure out the American bureaucratic system and a distraught dog breeder who had just lost 14 of her animals to heat stroke. Fortunately for my parents, my preferred tool is a BIC retractable pen, not a blow dryer. | ||||
 | Pouya Dianat
Deciding to become a photographer and wanting to do it well meant giving up a good amount of shut-eye. But you do what you can when you can. I’ve slept in a thermal sleeping bag wedged between soldiers under tanks in the Mojave Desert. I’ve counted a few sheep at the top of the Georgia Dome during the NCAA Tournament. I managed to cat-nap in a rental car on Bourbon Street between TV trucks, military police and other reporters during Hurricane Katrina. I’ve dozed at countless rest stops along the East Coast while covering the NFL, college hoops and a few unfortunate NASCAR races. The one place I’ve gotten the most sleep is the grimy, multi-colored couch in the editor’s office of The Diamondback, where I’ve been the managing editor for two years. I’ve interned at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution during the past two summers. I’ve also assisted Sports Illustrated since I was a freshman in college, and I freelance for a wire service regularly. To this day, my proudest moment came during my sophomore year, when I got my first photo in The Post. | ||||
 | Virgil Dickson
“Are you writing a book or something?” As a child in Louisville, this was a question I heard a lot. I had no problem getting all up in people's business. When I realized I could make a career out of it in middle school, I knew my destiny was set. After moving to Chicago, I joined the staff of the Depaulia, my college newspaper. That summer I got my first professional journalism gig in Upstate New York, where I worked at singer Mariah Carey’s summer camp as a teacher’s assistant in the journalism courses. Two internships followed next summer, one as a reporter at the weekly Chicago Journal and the other in the billing office of the Chicago Tribune. It was important for me to experience both sides of the industry. My 2006 internships were at the Austin-American Statesman as a Chips Quinn Scholar and at the Daily Herald, the third-largest newspaper in the Chicago market. At the beginning of the year I returned to the Chicago Tribune to intern at its youth tabloid publication, the RedEye. In February 2007 I won an award for investigative reporting from the Illinois College Press Association. I will receive a bachelor of arts degree from DePaul University in June. | ||||
 | Omar Fekeiki
I was born and raised in a Baghdad family that appreciated and practiced writing, but I never thought I’d become a journalist because I lived under a dictatorship. To me, it was a taboo profession because the only thing journalists did under the regime of Saddam Hussein was to praise the government and lie to the people. It was rare that I read any article in an Iraqi newspaper that depicted the real life and difficulties Iraqis had to endure. In April 2003, I met with The Post’s Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who offered me a job as a translator. I took it because I was very curious. I had studied English literature for five years in college, but I never had the chance to speak to a native speaker until that day. As the days passed, I became more interested in journalism. I witnessed how stories were written based on information from sources, and that excited me. I came to realize that journalism was the way I could help Iraq. I started to report stories by myself, and I eventually started to write my own stories. My goal doesn’t stop here. My ultimate desire is not to be a reporter. I want to start a newspaper in Iraq, where I will apply what I have learned from years of working for The Post. The way to achieve this goal is to learn about journalism in the United States, both in the classroom and in practice. That was why I applied to the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, where I am studying now, and that is why I am looking forward to working for The Post in Washington this summer. I plan to return to Iraq after I graduate in August 2008. | ||||
 | Gregory Finley
I didn’t have much editing experience last year but really wanted an internship. One of my professors told me I should make editing marks on an article published on the Web site of the Modesto Bee, an 87,000-circulation daily in California, and enclose the scribbled printout with my application for an internship. The technique landed me the gig and probably helped me get here as well. Assuming I passed all my classes this semester, I will have earned my bachelor’s degree in journalism after three years of college. I spent all six semesters working in various capacities for The Orion, my student newspaper. Most recently, I was the managing editor. I grew up in east San Diego County and decided to come to Chico State because it was the second-farthest state school from home, and it had a good journalism program. I am coming to the The Post through the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund. | ||||
 | Keith Hautala
My first newspaper jobs were delivering the Martinez (Calif.) News-Gazette and, later, the Contra Costa Times. From there my career took a scenic detour. I studied acting and film at a community college for a couple of years, supporting myself with restaurant work and other menial employment. Seeking greater fortune, I moved to Chicago, where I worked office jobs and studied improv with the Players Workshop of the Second City. I met my wife and followed her home to Lexington, Ky. There, we opened a coffeehouse, which was a success in nearly every way — except financially. We gave up after two years. I took a job at the University of Kentucky so I could take a few classes for free. I ended up falling in love with journalism. For the past two years, I’ve worked part-time as a copy editor for the Lexington Herald-Leader while finishing a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in mass communication. I also teach freshman college composition. When I’m not working, I make my own bagels, play with my three dogs, read (mostly nonfiction) and watch way more television than I should. Despite 20 years of trying, I am unable to play the guitar. | ||||
 | Monica Hesse
Last week, I attended a leather conference with a group of dominatrixes. They were nice girls, showing me the proper way to hold a flogger and the difference between American and English styles of whipping. A gimp offered to carry my backpack. My mom was horrified, but it seems to me that if you meet a dominatrix and she invites you to hang out, you should. You should because you are curious, and because, naturally, it might turn into a story. The dominatrix experience is one of the more madcap adventures I’ve embarked on in the name of curiosity. Runners up: learning the business of alligator gutting, getting my soul saved at a Pentecostal church, celebrating Samhain with a coven of witches and only learning “skyclad” meant “naked” after the ceremony had begun. These escapades have been mostly on my free time; crazy notions that turned into articles for The Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, People, and Men’s Health. My day job for the past three years has been working as an editor at AARP the Magazine, while completing my M.A. in nonfiction writing at Johns Hopkins on the side. I received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr in 2003. I’ve written for the Washingtonian and DC Style, and was the interim features editor for OnTap in 2006. | ||||
 | Jenna Johnson
I grew up in a newspaper family, which means that at an early age I vowed I would never become a journalist. It just seemed like too many late nights, too many angry phone calls, too many weird co-workers and definitely not enough pay. I just couldn’t understand why my mom (a graphic artist) and dad (a jack-of-all-newsroom-trades who spent most of his time as an editor) were so enamored with the profession. But then I joined my high school paper staff and, well, here I am. It’s been a fun ride so far – one that has taken me to the other side of the world, to three internships in the Midwest and into the amazing lives of people I would otherwise never have met. I am officially a California native but grew up in Omaha and will graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln this May. I started writing for the Daily Nebraskan before I even started classes and am leaving as the editor in chief. I love attempting to cook, drinking pinot noir, traveling on weekends, acrylic painting, pointy high heels and strong, dark coffee. | ||||
 | Alejandro Lazo
My mother, a strong woman, raised me. She always stressed that I should live a practical life. She never much emphasized politics, art, writing, all things I came to love. What she talked about was poverty and how important it was for her to escape it. An immigrant from Argentina, she was happy to leave a bloody mess of a nation behind for a stable life in the United States. So it was an important moment of self-declaration, years later, when I abandoned a scholarship to study biological sciences at the University of San Francisco and switched to politics. It led me where I am today. I have never really viewed my desire to be a journalist in the strict terms of having a career. Careers are boring. Journalism is a rush and always best thought of as where you are in any given moment, because that could be anywhere, and that’s exciting. Journalism for me has also always been about being a bit of an outsider, an observer. My goal is to write stories that reveal something about human nature. I love well-reported narratives, regardless of their subject. I hope to do this kind of work at The Post. I will graduate this year with a master of arts from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. It is a new degree program that offers specialties, and mine is in business and economics. I was a member of the school’s master of science class in 2006. I have worked at the daily Lodi News-Sentinel and weekly Riverdale Press, and I interned for the New York Times in Stamford, Conn., and for Newsday on Long Island. | ||||
 | Kendra Marr
When I arrived at Northwestern University, my entire life fit neatly into two suitcases and a box. And since I spent a good portion of my college journalism career bouncing from one city to the next, it stayed that way. I started in Evanston, Ill., where I wrote for and edited my campus newspaper, The Daily Northwestern. Then I was off to South Florida to intern as a reporter for the Miami Herald. I made my way to California, where I covered two cities and copy-edited for the Orange County Register. Then I left the land of sunshine and theme parks to return to college just in time for a snowy winter. I ate too much deep-dish pizza, explored Chicago and sat riveted through two seasons of “Lost.” Before I knew it, I was back to my San Francisco Bay area roots, writing about health for the San Jose Mercury News. Since then I’ve settled down. I’ve been investigating a possible wrongful murder conviction with the Medill Innocence Project, enjoying my senior year … and accumulating a whole lot of junk! When I graduate with a bachelor’s degree in journalism this June, I'll be driving to Washington with an overflowing carload of silly mementos and books I just can’t seem to abandon. | ||||
 | Mariana Minaya
I got a taste for immersing myself in other people’s worlds as a small child. My parents’ friends, South American intellectuals living in a troubled political era, would recount harrowing stories of their time spent in prisons or escaping military forces. Even when they thought the quiet seven-year-old girl wasn’t listening, I absorbed every word. Though the details of their stories have faded by now, the feeling of reliving those events through their recollections is vividly ingrained in my mind. I can experience it every time I report a story. I took my childhood passion to middle school, and I’ve been hooked on school newspapers since. This year I am editor in chief of the University of Maryland’s independent student daily, the Diamondback. In 2005, I interned on the Baltimore Sun’s health desk. The following summer, I worked on the Orlando Sentinel’s metro desk. I’ve covered crimes, features, elections and university administrators. I am fluent in Spanish, and I expect to earn a B.A. in print journalism from the University of Maryland in 2008. | ||||
 | Lindsay Minnema
I am a chronic over-packer. Never was this more true than at the end of my semester abroad in fall 2005, when I found myself stuffing dozens of European newspapers into my luggage. I could not read the languages they were written in, but I loved those papers for their colors, photos, graphics and ads, and I was not about to leave any of them behind. Nothing makes me happier than a beautifully designed newspaper—except for maybe a suitcase containing four times as many shoes as I really need. A June 2007 graduate from Northwestern University with a bachelor of science in journalism, I double-majored in political science and minored in economics. I worked as a designer for the Daily Northwestern all four years of college. As design editor my senior year, I facilitated a redesign of the paper. I also served as art director of Northwestern's business school newspaper, the Merger. I have interned as a page designer for the Orlando Sentinel; as a political reporter for the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents Association, where I covered the state legislature; and as a business reporter for United Communications Group, a newsletter publisher based in Rockville. I hail from Mount Airy, Md. | ||||
 | Jonathan Mummolo
I remember how hard my heart was pounding as I approached the metal detector. I was in line for admission to then-Gov. George Pataki’s invitation-only Manhattan reception following his successful reelection bid. I had no ticket, and—as a first-semester journalism student — no business being there. But five minutes later, with little more than a clean suit and a polite nod, I slipped through the cracks in the security system and was interviewing supporters in the hotel ballroom. I was hooked. It was a matter of days before I joined NYU’s student paper, Washington Square News, where I rose to investigations editor. While in New York, I completed news reporting internships at the New York Sun and Newsday, covering mostly crime and local politics. After graduating with degrees in history and journalism, and a minor in music, I enrolled in Georgetown’s MA program in American government and went on to work as an intern reporter at Newsweek magazine for nine months. While reporting for Newsweek in New York and Washington, I authored and contributed to stories on subjects ranging from entertainment and technology to stem cells and the Iraq war. Now, about to start an internship at The Post, my heart’s pounding once again—this time with a bit more confidence, and with no armed guards in my path. | ||||
 | Amy Orndorff
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. | ||||
 | Catherine Rampell
This summer I am marrying my brother. Marrying him to someone, that is; I’m the makeshift rabbi at his upcoming wedding in Japan. While I know neither Japanese nor Hebrew, I do speak mamahuhu Chinese and un poquito de Spanish, and I’ll hopefully study shwaya Arabic this summer. Last summer I worked on the USA Today news desk, where I won a Hainer Award and became the first intern to write a cover story. In previous lives I’ve written and/or interned for NBC News & MSNBC.com (Beijing bureau), the Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, National Public Radio, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Gannett News Service and various others. At Princeton I’m an op-ed columnist for the Daily Princetonian and a research assistant for a New York Times columnist. I also write/act/choreograph for the Princeton Triangle Club, the nation’s oldest (and punniest) collegiate musical comedy troupe, for which I produced and co-wrote an off-Broadway show last year. My favorite paperweight is my recently completed senior thesis, which analyzed get-out-the-vote groups that target young people. | ||||
 | Renée Rigdon
My first and only brush with journalism thus far came when I was a junior in high school. I was the copy editor for the school newspaper, and the editor in chief was a student whose debut story told the tale of her bad haircut and the resulting emotional turmoil. In college my interest in the sciences took me on quite a different path. As an undergraduate, I majored in math and meteorology at Ohio University and even served as associate director for the Scalia Laboratory for Atmospheric Analysis, the university’s student-run weather lab. Along the way, I acquired quite a bit of experience with mapping and geographic information systems. Realizing that my true interests were in cartography, I decided to stay at OU to pursue a graduate degree. My experience mainly lies in thematic, relief, and animated/interactive mapping, and my particular focus these past few years has been mapping the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons. Currently, I have a graduate assistantship at ILGARD, a local government institution, where I edit and maintain the OU campus map. Despite my limited experience in the field of journalism, I look forward to bringing my cartographic skills and passion for maps to The Post. | ||||
 | Ethan Robinson
I was born in a small town in Montana, raised in a small town in Northern California, attend a small college in a huge state that has only one area code, and have worked as a copy editor at my campus newspaper for three semesters and as a Dow Jones copy editing intern at the Los Angeles Times for 10 weeks last summer. I moved a lot when I was younger, but until I started college I had never lived in an actual town, but always several miles on the outskirts of one. I was 14 or 15 when we finally got satellite TV, and before that, the exciting moment of my days came when my stepdad got home from work with a copy of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat in his lunch box. Probably since middle school I knew I wanted to work at a newspaper. I thought I wanted to write stories, but in college I’ve learned that I actually wanted to be the person who reads stories and helps to make them better. Reading the news still excites me, and writing a good one-column headline or catching a "who/whom" error gives me all the joy I need in a day. | ||||
 | Marianne Seregi
I am a Kansas native with an affinity for graphic novels and shoddy sports teams, the Royals, the Chiefs and even the Jayhawks (when they play UCLA). This summer will be my second at The Post – I couldn’t pass up the chance to see Tom Wilkinson’s farmhouse again. Working with the News Art team last year revolutionized how I saw visual journalism. For me, it’s the perfect integration of my traditional journalism education and my love for design. This June I will graduate from Northwestern University with a bachelor of science in journalism. In addition to coming to The Post, I completed design and graphic internships at the Kansas City Star, the Charlotte Observer and Stars and Stripes. I’ve also worked for Abroad View, a national study-abroad magazine, and the Daily Northwestern. What have I most enjoyed about being a college senior going into graphic arts? The fact that doodling is not only accepted but also encouraged. | ||||
 | Stephen Stromberg
I have been writing editorials on and off for the past six years, so forgive my brevity. I grew up in L.A. I went to college in Boston. Then graduate school in England. Over the past year working in Editorial I have happily covered everything from the Supreme Court to the Chesapeake Bay’s stock of menhaden (a small, oily fish harvested en masse off the Virginia coast). Before the Post, I wrote for the Los Angeles Times editorial page, the paper’s Sunday Current section and Salon.com. I also speak Russian. | ||||
 | Megan Voelkel
My mother wanted me to become a doctor. My father hoped I’d go to law school. To the nurse and the accountant, journalism didn’t seem “practical” for a girl from a small town in Mississippi. To their slightly stubborn daughter, who wrote her eighth grade career paper on the thrills of being an editor, a life of deadlines and column inches fits perfectly. By senior year of high school, I was a veteran editor of a 400-page, award-winning yearbook and the class valedictorian. At Samford University, where I received a journalism degree in December, I spent my junior year as editor in chief of the student newspaper, the Samford Crimson. During the summer of 2005, I was at Mississippi Magazine, writing quirky features on everything from birdhouse architecture to barcode specialists. Last summer, as the first recipient of the Timothy S. Robinson fellowship, I spent two weeks in TV Week, Sunday Source and Home at The Post before covering health, food and fitness as an editorial intern at Cooking Light magazine. I also attended the 2006 Bloomberg College Editors’ Leadership Workshop at Columbia University and was named College Journalist of the Year at this year's Southeast Journalism Conference. Outside of the newsroom, I’m an avid tennis fan and volunteer literacy tutor. | ||||
 | Elisheva Weiss
I was supposed to go to law school. That had always been the plan — even after I sold my soul to the Columbia Daily Spectator. Even after I became Spec’s head copy editor, wrote the Spec style guide, dozed on the filthy office couch more times than I’d like to admit and watched many sunrises from the grimy window of the Spectator office. I grew up on Long Island and spent a year studying in Jerusalem before entering Columbia University. My time at Columbia has been marked by my experience on the undergraduate paper more than by the classes I’ve taken for my major in political science and the creative writing program. As head copy editor, I compiled an in-house style guide, built a copy staff and taught the entire newspaper staff basic style rules. But it wasn’t until I spent a summer copy editing — at the Washington Times — that I realized I wanted to dedicate myself to commas and em dashes. At some point between when I first walked into the Spectator office as a first-year student and when I started contemplating filling out law school applications, I fell in love with journalism. My grandmother is still hoping I’ll change my mind, but I’m sold. | ||||
 | Steven Yanda
The most important thing Bill Norton did for my budding career in journalism was to laugh at me. Okay, it was more of a chuckle, but the effect stood nonetheless. From my sophomore year to my senior year of high school in Kansas City, Mo., I wrote for Norton in a section of the FYI department of the Kansas City Star known as TeenStar. Norton had introduced me to the writings of Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith, and upon reading the material, I informed him I would one day be better than Smith. He chuckled. Then he realized I was serious and has tried to help me on my journey ever since. I spent two summers stringing for the Star’s Sports department and have covered sports for the Marquette Tribune at Marquette University for the past two years. In the spring of 2008, I will graduate with a major in journalism and a minor in sociology. I have reported on a variety of sports, but most enjoy depicting the different personalities that pervade those sports. I am nowhere near Smith’s level yet, but that still is my goal. Norton probably still chuckles when he recalls what I told him that day. I’m hoping to change that. | ||||
 | Xiyun Yang
I’ve never been one for convention, so halfway through college I took some time off and moved to Tunisia. I learned French and a little Arabic and taught English (badly), but my best time there was spent traveling and collecting stories. It was then that I realized there was nothing else I’d rather do. I was born in Beijing but raised in Chicago, and wanderlust set in sometime in between. I am fluent in Chinese and French, with aspirations, if only pale, towards Spanish. I’ve interned with the Dow Jones Newswires offices in Brussels and the Chicago Tribune in Beijing, and I have written stories for the Providence Journal, the South China Morning Post and the Wall Street Journal. I have an insatiable passion for food and write a food column for an English monthly in Beijing. I will be graduating in May 2007 from Brown, double majoring in comparative literature and international relations. | ||||
 | Matt Zapotsky
A junior journalism major at Ohio University, I have worked at four different newspapers, including my college publication. At the Columbus Dispatch last summer, I helped monitor the police beat and reported mostly on fatal shootings, fires and car crashes. I also covered a variety of general news topics — everything from a ferret beauty pageant to a mayoral press conference on environmentally friendly homes. My most notable stories at the Dispatch were two crime-related enterprise pieces — one analyzing about 100 narcotics search warrants and the other examining why homicide witnesses in Columbus typically refused to cooperate. Before my work at the Dispatch, I served as an editorial intern at the weekly Toledo Free Press. My marquee story there looked at the possibility of workers’ stress being a factor in two shootings at the Toledo Jeep plant. At the Post, the daily, student-run newspaper at Ohio University, I have served as both an editor and reporter, but I find myself most happy covering breaking news and digging through public records for investigative pieces. My most notable story at The Post looked at records showing the Athens city law director might have a conflict of interest in owning local properties. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where my dad is a photographer at the Toledo Blade and my mom is in a management position at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center. In the limited free time that pursuing a career in journalism allows, I enjoy cooking. | ||||
 | Joshua Zumbrun
I’m from Indiana, where the Zumbruns have been farming since the mid-1800s. Farmers have a certain sensibility I find lacking in city folk. From experience I can tell you that pigs, for example, are mean, nasty animals. They deserve to be eaten. I always wanted to be a writer. At 8 or 9, I wrote a story about animals taking over the farm, and the nasty pigs were their leaders. I came up with this idea completely on my own and was crushed to learn that this story had already been written. After high school, I left for Europe. I spent the next year living out of my backpack. I talked a Web site, gapyear.com, into letting me write a blog, but of course, nobody called them blogs back then. I didn’t get paid, but when I came through London they gave me free beer. At 18 it was the coolest job possible. I applied to Georgetown from an Internet cafe in Barcelona. And after more traveling and six months in the former Soviet Union teaching English, I returned stateside to study international economics. Somewhere along the line my major switched to the college newspaper. The Post hired me at the end of my junior year to fill out the lottery numbers. Eventually they trusted me enough to do the weather map on the back of Metro. I got reams of useful advice, such as: “You’ll never become a reporter at the Post, you should apply to the Suburban Missoula Alternative Weekly,” or “Newspapers are dead, kid.” But I got a lot of encouragement too, and figured it could never be as devastating as learning about Orwell’s “Animal Farm." So I stuck it out and freelanced when I could. So far, so good. | ||||