BIO
My mom recently told me that when I was five years old I started a habit of using words outside my range of expertise. She recently read me her journal entry from 20 years ago that described me walking up to my Dad and saying, "Dad, I really appreciate this ice cream." I then promptly found my mom and asked, "Mom, what does 'appreciate' mean?
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I guess that was the earliest indication that I love learning and I love words.
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The summer before college I decided that I wanted to be a journalist thanks to the encouragement of my English teachers, who all told me that I had a gift for writing.
My freshman year of college I quickly became enamored by the field of journalism because, to me, it's the best job in the world. I can't believe journalists get paid to learn new things by talking to the top experts in different fields or by talking with regular people who have a story to tell.
A classmate recently interviewed me about why I want to be a journalist for a class project and this is what I told her:
"I want to try being in a circus. I want to try opening my own bakery. I want to try being a doctor. I can't do it all in one lifetime. But by talking to people who have done those things, I feel like I'm getting a small piece of all of them."
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After college, I immediately moved to New York to do a full-time internship at Business Insider for seven months. This exciting experience taught me how to pitch daily stories, how to write quickly, and how to get readers' attention on the web.
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While I enjoyed my time writing fun, evergreen content for BI, I decided I wanted to do reporting on more serious, timely topics.
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I took an entry-level job at TheStreet as a breaking news reporter -- the grunt job of every newsroom. I was required to write 15 stories a day on breaking news within the finance and economics beats. The first month, I was overwhelmed. I didn't even know what an earnings report looked like at the time. But by month two, I earned an award for being the most productive member of the team. And after six months on the job, I felt like I had been paid to get my MBA.
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I was promoted to tech reporter at TheStreet, which gave me the opportunity to delve deeper into stories and to build up a wide source network. This beat also taught me how important it is that reporters know everything about their beat so they can provide context for their readers.
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During my time as a tech reporter, I broke the story about Amazon's plan for Whole Foods copying what Alibaba was already doing with grocery stores in China -- and had been doing for years. During the two years that I worked at TheStreet, I never saw a story get more traffic on our site than that story. Bloomberg and WSJ both said they were impressed by my article and later wrote similar ones. After The Motley Fool read the article, they started tracking my work and eventually asked me to come work for them.
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My time at The Motley Fool was valuable because I had to insert my own analysis. That meant I had to understand my stories even better because I was considered the expert, rather than an analyst or economics professor that I interviewed.
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And now I'm back in school and honored to be one of 18 students in the inaugural investigative journalism master's program at the Cronkite School. I'm also honored to be a graduate assistant for Cronkite's renowned Reynolds Business Reporting Bureau, which hands out the Barlett & Steele investigative business journalism awards. My job is to write stories for its site businessjournalism.org. My stories are meant to help business journalists do their job better by explaining complex topics they might cover or by giving them unique story ideas.
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I've had many people ask why I left a career in the New York journalism scene. But a theme that has run through my life is the drive to always be the best. That's why I worked so hard at TheStreet to become the most productive member of my team. And that's why I'm going back to school to get my MA in investigative journalism at one of the best journalism schools. I want to stand out in the newsroom. And I want my reporting and writing to stand out on the web.
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