I work as a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C., where I split my time between covering technology and writing about research in the humanities and social sciences.
It’s a great beat. I write about how the Internet is reinventing college life, be it through online classes, student data-mining, or humanities scholarship. Most of our readers aren’t techies, though, so I try to tell stories grounded in the people affected by new technologies rather than the circuits that enable them.
I also cover the world of ideas for The Chronicle and its weekly magazine, The Chronicle Review. I’ve profiled Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist studying the tribal mentality of politics; Tim Wu, a law professor fighting corporate control of the internet; and Raymond Tallis, a British philosopher crusading against “neurotrash.”
I got to Washington after spending five years working a series of daily newspaper jobs. The most recent one was in Albany, N.Y., where I juggled two beats: higher education and religion. That meant that one week I might be writing about why so many college students get robbed, and another week about why so few Catholics go to confession anymore. I broke a bunch of stories about controversies surrounding the highest-paid private college president in America, RPI’s Shirley Ann Jackson.
Other places I worked before Albany include The Cape Cod Times and Facts on File News Service. I interned in the Queens bureau at Newsday and at the publishing house Farrar Straus and Giroux. I’ve had the opportunity to do some radio as well, appearing on local and national NPR programs to talk about my stories.
Before 2009, my Washington experience was limited to one conference and some sight-seeing trips. I grew up in Queens, N.Y. and Princeton, N.J. I got my bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature through the Residential College program at University of Michigan. After working in New York City for a few years, I went back to school and got my master’s in journalism at Columbia University. My hobbies include studying black-and-white film photography at the Smithsonian, buying more books than I can read, and wishing I had more tennis partners.
