They’ve done it again. The Columbia Publishing Course has hatched a new group of graduates and, as usual, they’re even more accomplished than last year’s. We’ve created our annual composite biographical sketch of the ultimate graduates, taken from actual bios of the 100 students. Meet these future industry mavens at Columbia’s Career Day on July 31st at the Columbia Graduate School of Jounalism; call 212.854.1898 to RSVP, or e-mail publishing@jrn.columbia.edu or visit www.jrn.columbia.edu/publishing to post job openings. Now, hold on because you’re about to be blown away…
Currently living on an organic beef farm in Millbrook, New York, our student grew up in an L-shaped apartment in Queens with a boisterous Brazilian-Korean family where she learned to read English from translations of Hergé’s Tintin comics. Though her multi-cultural, tri-lingual household fostered an interest in other cultures, her passion for traveling was solidified when her parents home-schooled her for sixteen months while visiting all seven continents and writing the family newsletter “Around the World in 480 Days.”
This first taste of journalism inspired her to create an underground literary magazine from scratch which was later adopted as her school’s official award-winning publication. When not working long hours at the magazine, our student organized events for her high school’s first Harry Potter Club (which she co-founded), practiced traditional Polish and Irish dancing, and performed in the Tap Dance Olympics in Germany where her team won the title of World Champions two years in a row. A country girl at heart, our student spent many happy summers lassoing cattle and fly-fishing in Wyoming, earning her spending money by delivering balloon bouquets to local college students and fulfilling her humanitarian impulse by volunteering with her father at nearly every Special Olympics event in New Jersey. After graduating from high school with honors, our student, like numerous Columbia publishing classmates, walked 400 kilometers through northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago. Upon her return to the States, she put to use the huge thighs she developed on the hike, driving a bicycle taxi in downtown Austin, Texas. But she soon returned to the East Coast to attend the University of Pennsylvania from which she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with highest departmental honors. Though our student enjoyed studying the exegesis of biblical texts, Victorian repression of animalism, and postcolonial literature with famed Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, she decided to write an honors thesis on the “disappearing” pronouns thou, ni, vos, and Loro, conducting original research in English, Swedish, Spanish, and Italian. Her intellectual curiosity got the better of her and she wrote an additional honors thesis on missionaries in nineteenth-century Ceylon which earned her the school’s prestigious prize for best historical dissertation. In her spare time, she learned to operate a hyperbaric chamber, played marimba in the UPenn percussion ensemble, wrote a novella about the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, and tutored underprivileged children, raising the reading scores of 60% of them. Since graduation in May, our student has been hard at work developing the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in Brooklyn. The skills she gained turning the Chicago’s Women in the Director’s Chair festival into a financial and artistic success have helped her in this new endeavor. In addition to internships at Gawker and The Onion, our student is trying her hand at agenting, representing Michael Jackson‘s chauffeur who is, naturally, writing a memoir.
