Tell me about yourself. 

The boring answer: I’m a journalism and English double major with a minor in Korean who studied at UW from 2020-2024. I’m an aspiring local news reporter seeking to work at a print/digital outlet post-graduation.

The real answer: I love writing and understanding people through their stories. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to major in during college — except that it would probably be in the humanities — and spent my entire freshman year exploring English, comparative literature, Korean, international studies, and more. I landed on majoring in journalism once I started working for our campus newspaper as a staff writer, and in English simply because it felt right and reading literary masterpieces never felt like studying. But deciding to pursue journalism as a career was a longer journey. 

 

Take me on that journey.

Are you sure? It’s a long one …

It started when I enrolled in the journalism and media track at the National Student Leadership Conference, a 1-week summer program for high school students hosted at colleges and universities around the country. Basically, we got a crash course in journalism and communication while getting to experience “university life” for a week. One of the highlights was a “newsroom simulation,” where we were tasked with breaking news coverage of a fake incident complete with press conferences, chasing down sources, and social media updates on a minute-to-minute basis. While I enjoyed it and found I could write under pressure, it scared me away from journalism. That experience combined with all that I’d heard about journalists being pushy, aggressive, and even reckless in their pursuit of a story, running to danger rather than away from it, convinced me that I could never make journalism into a career.

As I became more involved at The Daily, I began to see gradually that these stereotypes don’t necessarily have to be true. I remember telling one of my journalism professors that I felt like my introverted personality would forever bar me from becoming a good journalist. His answer surprised me: journalism is actually great for introverts, because interviews are basically controlled conversations. Working for The Daily and doing 50+ interviews with people from all kinds of backgrounds has shown me that journalism is actually about connecting with people and being a good listener. 

My time in the UW’s journalism program has given me a good basis in the basics of journalism theory and practice. Taking a course on media and diversity introduced me to concepts of advocacy journalism, immersion journalism, and solutions journalism – newer models for reporting that challenge long-held beliefs about the journalist-source relationship and better center communities in the stories that are told. For the first time, I saw just how fast this field is changing — and felt permission to forge my own path through it. 

That path can be summarized in part by my journalism and life philosophy of “looking for the little things.” I’ve become convinced that good journalism is fundamentally about sensitive engagement with people around you. And that starts by noticing things about them and their lives. What do they care about? What do they worry about? What bigger process or system is affecting their lives in the here and now? Those are the kinds of stories I want to read because they help me understand how other people live, and thus better relate to them. I want others to have access to those kinds of stories as well.

 

Why did you double major in English literature and language? What value does studying books from the past have? 

As a literature major and lifelong reader, I love reading deep, thinking books like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden or Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that give me a window into the minds and tendencies of people, even if the plot may be simple. I’ve been humbled time and time again by how hard it is to understand people, and every time I’m surprised by someone — a hidden talent, or a sudden vulnerability — I realize that people are so much more nuanced than I thought. 

Being an English major has given me the opportunity to mull over other (fictional, or real) people’s inner dialogues and thought processes. It’s fueled my curiosity about people that makes me get up in the morning to do journalism. 

 

What’s a quote that best represents your approach to journalism? To life? 

I love the Emily of New Moon series by L. M. Montgomery (the same author who wrote Anne of Green Gables). Emily is an aspiring writer, and takes much of her inspiration from the natural world around her. Sometimes, she gets what she calls “the flash,” a feeling of inspiration and excitement that compels her to write. In Emily of New Moon, Montgomery describes Emily’s “flash” like this:  

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“Tonight the dark boughs against that far-off sky had given it. It had come with a high, wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field, with a grey bird lighting on her windowsill in a storm, with the singing of “Holy, holy, holy” in church, with a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with the spirit-like blue of ice palms on a twilit pane, with a felicitous new word when she was writing down a ‘description’ of something. And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty.”

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I’ve always been enchanted by the idea of finding your spark in the little moments of your everyday life. It reflects my approach to journalism – the value of being observant and attentive to small details around you – but also something more philosophical that I resonate with: this idea of seeking to behold beauty, wherever it can be found.

 

Why do you put “To God be the glory” in your social media profiles?

One of my biggest personal struggles as an aspiring journalist is the responsibility and excitement that comes with seeing your name in print. I’ve come to the conclusion that people are the lifeblood of journalism, but it’s all too easy to take credit for a story that I’ve written and forget about all the people who helped it come to fruition. It’s also really easy to become fearful and anxious about people’s receptions to my writing out in the public sphere, and get caught up with trying to please people with what I write. I put “To God be the glory” in my social media bios to remind me who I’m doing the work for – that ultimately, I’ll be held accountable by a higher power every time I file a story.