My interest in journalism grew out of my interest in sports. For most of my life, I have been an avid reader of the daily sports section, so when I rarely saw the playing field on the sophomore baseball team at my Chicago high school, I decided to do something better with my time: I joined my school's student newspaper. By my senior year, I was editor and began thinking that being a sportswriter might be a pretty fun career.
Fortunately I wound up at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. While there, I worked for The Daily Northwestern, covering sports such as basketball, softball and even field hockey. Along the way, I also worked as a copy editor and sat on the publication's editorial board as Night Editor. As a senior, I even drove the pages to the printer in the middle of the night (yes, that was in the old days of paste-up.)
While at Medill, I served a three-month internship at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Fla. I did everything from writing obituaries, to covering sports, to copy editing, to covering the police beat, to designing pages. Other college experiences included a part-time job at Pro Football Weekly and freelance work for suburban Chicago weeklies and the Iowa City Press Citizen (for the Big Ten wrestling championships).
Following graduation, I worked for a few years as a sportswriter and editor for a couple of newspapers in suburban Chicago, mainly covering high school sports and anything related to our local communities. During this time, I also did some freelance work for the Chicago Sun-Times. I had the opportunity to cover several professional sports, college sports and Olympic athletes. When you work on a small paper, you do a little bit of everything; in addition to writing stories, I designed pages, edited copy and worked on special projects.
However, covering high school sports renewed an interest in teaching. Eventually I left my job and went to Northeastern Illinois University to get my teaching certification. For the next dozen years, I worked as a high school teacher. I received my master's degree in education from the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Miss., and later earned prestigious national board teaching certification. Although my main assignment was social studies, I also taught journalism and advised the high school's newspaper. We won a few awards and several of my students decided to pursue journalism as a career obtaining employment at the Chicago Tribune, ESPN and The Golf Channel, among others.
During my time at Hononegah High School in Rockton, Ill., we revived the student newspaper into a thriving publication. I became involved in scholastic journalism and served as vice president and then president of the Illinois Journalism Education Association, the state's organization of journalism advisers. I also served on the organizing committee for the 2005 JEA Fall Convention, setting up many of the speakers.
I have spoken and served as a judge at local and national high school journalism conferences and worked at several summer journalism workshops. I was selected to attend the Freedom Forum's Free Spirit Journalism Conference in 2001 and have also attended Poynter Institute's National Writing Workshops in St. Louis for 2002-2004. In the summer of 2004, I was selected to attend a month-long historical seminar in Philadelphia by the National Endowment for the Humanities. During the summer of 2005, I spent my summer vacation as a full-time copy editor at the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star, then our local Gannett newspaper.
In 2005 the school at which I taught cut the journalism program. After working one year without teaching journalism or advising the school newspaper, I decided that I missed the subject too much and needed a change. I then pursued my Ph.D. at Ohio University as a Scripps-Howard Teaching Fellow, combining my interests in journalism and teaching. Here I broadened my skills and learned how to use multimedia effectively.
When my graduate fellowship at Ohio University ran out, I headed to Bowling Green State University. At both schools, I have developed and taught almost every course imaginable from beginning journalism courses to online journalism to feature writing. While some professionals sometimes hope to end up in a classroom someday, teaching at the college level has fueled my passion for doing journalism even further. In order to teach something, you have to learn it even better for yourself, so I think I am a better journalist now than ever.
The more I taught, the more I decided I needed to get back in the field. With this in mind, I am hoping to pursue a position in which I am able to employ my writing, editing, multimedia and leadership skills. In addition, I am looking to explore freelance writing opportunities.