"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them." - Walt Disney
It's kind of a funny story. But hey, because of this story, I'm living the best life I will ever have!
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I can easily trace my origins of wanting to become a journalist back to my older brother and my dad, and they used to be sports reporters for Fordham University's radio station, 90.7 FM WFUV. I've heard stories about their work so many times, and I couldn't be any prouder to be related to such wonderfully talented men! While I wish I would have seen them continue this path, life does change in strange ways - after graduating from Fordham, dad got a job in information technology, and my brother currently works in accounting (in fact, he been working with HBO in Manhattan since this March, so that's a plus if you think about it!).
So yes, I tumbled into this field because of my family's experience in radio! Moreover, during my first college tour at my alma mater, my dad kept telling me to join 88.7 FM WRHU... You heard me right!
WRHU FM: The #1 Non-Commercial Station in the Nation
At that time, I immediately turned down the idea of joining the station. Why? I was scared of two daunting possibilities: Being embarrassed for being the only one in the station with my major, and for simply feeling left out by all of the other student members just because I had a major that wasn't in the school of communications. Even though all undergraduate students with any kind of major was allowed to join WRHU, I doubted my unknown potential.
Fast forward to 2014, when I was in the midst and rush of my Japanese language and cultural studies, I encountered a WRHU alum in my major advisor's literature course. She immediately ignited my journalist flame, and her name was Emi Feldman.
Emi, who currently works for CBS This Morning, was a year above me earning her degree in broadcast journalism with a minor in drama. While we only had very few conversations during the class we were coincidentally in, something changed within me...
Without even knowing it at the time, I was already on my way of becoming a global multimedia journalist when I was hired to be a staff translator/writer for ARAMA! JAPAN right before my junior year. I was also seriously considering about joining WRHU during that time, too - but then my anxiety reemerged as soon as the fall semester began...
"I should definitely go for the radio sta--no wait... I can't! I'll be that weird upperclassman with little to no experience in a pool full of hopeful underclassmen and experienced school of comm students!"
Those were the words running through my head all throughout junior year - I felt so torn apart, and in the end, I didn't have the courage to send out an application. However, junior year was when I began to hang out with two WRHU people who still stand as two of the best friends I met in college - Hayley Marks and Christian Ladigoski; both of them had such a great passion and drive for the broadcast media world, and they would always go for every opportunity in order to hone their craft.
Thanks to Hayley and Christian, they were the ones who gave me the courage to finally join the radio station during my senior year. In that moment, I thought how it was about time I got the guts to make that decision...
...and that still stands as one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.
Despite having only a year of experience on WRHU FM, I was involved in so many fun activities! Entertainment and business news reporting, creating packages about event coverage, being a news writer/anchor and public relations coordinator for a film talk show... Boy, it sure was an absolute blast! I absolutely loved the thrill of being behind that microphone as an on-air personality. But if there was one job at the radio station I really loved doing, it was being the host, producer, and engineer of Alternative Nation, WRHU's alternative rock music show. That show was my baby, and it still feels like my baby even though I did my last show back on August 29th... *sigh*
And now that I have the Odyssey under my journalist belt, what's next? Well, at this point, anything could be possible! I've been meeting and networking with so many professionals in the wonderful world of broadcast journalism and media communications, and I even applied to numerous jobs in those fields since graduation. While the numerous rejections and struggles of not hearing back from certain job applications are hard to go through right now, I'm still hanging in there! If there are two things I know for sure, it's this: I really hope to be that global multimedia journalist I've always wanted to be since I was 20, and I will never let my self-doubt get in the way of anything I may want to pursue in the future.
While I'm still just an amateur journalist, these past two years have made me strongly believe any kind of dream career we may want to have in life is always possible when we have absolute confidence in our potential, and do whatever we can do to make that dream into a reality.
To hear some of my radio cuts and other audio projects, please visit my profile on SoundCloud!
