Grad's guide to graduate admissions essays - Colleen Reding 2015
Northwestern university - Medill school of journalism, media, integrated marketing communications
General graduate studies
Please upload a document that tells us in 500 words or less what factors and influences have moved you toward a career in journalism. How have you pursued this career so far, and what are your goals? All applicants are encouraged to provide links to online examples of their work.
My dad is a stockbroker and my mom is a nurse. The majority of my relatives are either bankers or nurses. Clearly the idea of being a journalist was not instilled in me at birth. Instead, I grew up with an interest in the news and current events, specifically international relations, which came as a result of multiple moves between the U.S. and London during my childhood. During high school, I signed up for a journalism class where we produced the school’s monthly paper. Since that fateful elective, I have known that I wanted a career in journalism.
Journalism classes in both high school and college are helpful ways to learn the basics, but the best way to improve your writing and research skills is through practice. In that vein, internships at news organizations of different shapes and sizes have helped me to learn about the industry. I have interned at The Sunday Times in London over the course of three summers, where I worked on the News, News Review, and Motoring desks. This gave me the chance to see how a part of an international newspaper is run at a very early age.
At Georgetown University, I worked at The Hoya, the campus newspaper, starting out as a staff writer on the student government beat and progressing up to the position of City News Editor where I managed and trained a staff of writers. While abroad in Strasbourg, France, I was a part of Georgetown’s Junior Year Abroad Network, writing critical essays about the relationship between religion and politics in the city. When I returned to campus, I took my red pen and edited a professor’s book manuscript about the relationship between American politics and the media. I spent last summer working at a neighborhood newspaper in Washington, The Current Newspapers. Due to the small size of the publication, I was given a great amount of responsibility and wrote three articles per issue. This year I am a research assistant for Mary Jordan, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist at The Washington Post, which is giving me an inside look into the process of producing detailed features pieces. My most recent journalistic endeavor is the creation of a restaurant review blog, serving as a way to combine two of my passions (writing and eating) as well as familiarize myself with ways to gain an audience through new media.
Journalism is essentially storytelling. I want to become the best storyteller that I can, finding the most interesting, unusual stories and using my words to paint a picture for the reader.
