I grew up just outside of New York City in a small town called Chappaqua. Much of my childhood and adolescence was spent on numerous activities - from many sports (especially baseball) to all genres of music. Though I enjoyed living there, I did not want to stay in that type of small town environment. As I got older, I developed a strong interest in traveling and reading stories from all corners of the world. And while this started off as an occasional hobby, something to do every now and then, it ultimately developed into a key tenet of what I want to do in life. Both of my parents worked in the city, commuting there each day, while my brother also would attend school there. Even though I liked my the area a lot, by the end of high school, I knew that journalism would be a perfect fit for me because it would give me the freedom and flexibility needed to travel.
I initially started college at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. However, a combination of unappealing school environment and unpleasant somewhat cold really, really cold weather pushed me elsewhere. My interest in journalism had not waned; rather I wanted to be in a different setting. Shortly thereafter I found USC, a school that accommodated all my interests and put me in an environment that addressed my previous concerns. As for my work experience, I spent last summer in Cleveland working at the Republican National Convention as part of the production team. This back stage experience gave me a taste of what it takes to put together massive news events and it led to me becoming more interested in news production as a possible career choice. The time I have spent over the past three years living across four major U.S. cities has given me a base knowledge of all the skills I will need in the years to come.
Being a journalist allows me to pursue all my passions while having the freedom to travel around. If there is something that I'm particularly interested in - like sports for example - I can focus my beat on it. Also, I would never really be tied down in any one location - I could go wherever I want and also make a living off it. Another big draw for me is the wide range of knowledge required to be a successful journalist, which includes everything from coding to editing programs to writing.
I have always tried to have a wide range of interests across. Currently, I am most interested in sports (favorite sport is baseball ), music (favorite artists are Muse, Kendrick Lamar and The Doors), and travel (favorite city is Barcelona ). For baseball, I have been a huge Yankees fan throughout my life and have collected tons of memorabilia along the way. With music, I started off listening to The Who and The Doors, but my tastes eventually evolved to include rap, electronic music and more recent rock. Traveling has only been something I've done a lot within the past couple years, visiting England, Spain, France and Canada. I plan to travel a lot more once I'm out of college, with my first stops being in Europe and Southeast Asia.
