Work Experience

Emily has interned at WILL, a public radio and TV station based in Urbana, Ill., for three months. She is a frequent live tweeter of WILL’s morning talk show, Focus, and she writes and produces stories for the afternoon news hour.

She also helped edit audio interviews with local candidates in the November 2012 election, which were included in the station’s election coverage.

In the summer of 2012, Emily was one of six interns hired by the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire. She dived into political reporting at U.S. Senate hearings on health care and the economy, and she listened firsthand as Justices John Edwards and Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained the health-care ruling inside the Supreme Court.

She also wrote and pitched enterprise stories. One, on the woes of third-party candidates in the American political system, was published by the Scripps Howard News Service. Another, on a sport that embraced breast cancer survivorship, was published in the Washington Post Local Living section.

In the summer of 2011, Emily was a reporting intern for The SouthtownStar, a daily newspaper covering the south and southwest suburbs of Chicago. She wrote almost 40 articles for the publication, ranging in topic from breaking news to features, and shot photos and video footage. Several articles were also published in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Joliet Herald-News.

As part of her work as an intern, Emily compiled data from thousands of pages of documents as part of an investigation on the Country Club Hills government. She gave live updates from the Harry Potter movie premiere on the SouthtownStar’s Twitter account. She learned how to ask veterans’ families about their loved ones killed in action. She did not, however, learn how to make coffee.

Emily was buzz‘s online editor when the magazine launched its new website, readbuzz.com, in October 2011. She trained two interns in buzz style and WordPress. Together, they organized the new site, promoted the magazine using social media and created a relationship between the website and print editors.

Emily was the copy chief of buzz for the 2010-2011 school year. She hired and trained three copy editors and restructured the editing system so that every print story was read over at least four times before the final copy was published. A self-proclaimed grammar nerd, Emily often quizzed her copy editors on AP style, and she referenced the AP stylebook at least twice a day.

Though Emily never took a formal broadcast journalism class, she interned at WCIA, the CBS affiliate in Central Illinois, in the spring of 2011. Her duties mostly dealt with the production side — putting stories online, assisting the producer during broadcasts, finding quote-worthy clips to air. She also shadowed several reporters and called dozens of local police stations to scout for potential stories.

Emily was the editor-in-chief of her award-winning high school newspaper, the Voyager, at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Ill. She implemented a new editing process, changed the production schedule so that deadlines were more effective, and began roundtable discussions every issue in which all writers could pitch and hear topic ideas. Emily also was the 2009 state champion in the Illinois High School Association feature writing competition.

Emily worked as a resident advisor at Allen Hall, a residence hall of 655 students, for a year and a half. She put on about 8 to 10 programs a month, often collaborating with residents, campus groups, or other staff members. She was on call two to three times a month to respond to overnight emergencies, and she was the designated RA for about 50 students.

Emily matured tremendously and learned several important life skills during her experience, including: staying inclusive and non-judgmental; keeping a level head in emergencies; being a role model among peers; navigating bureaucracy; referring people to proper resources; and resolving conflicts.