Brynn Grimley - Fall 2003

I first came to Washington with my mother for two weeks when I was 12 and returned again a few years later for the weekend. Since those two visits, I have always said this was a city I could live in, but I never thought that 10 years later, at 22, I would leave my beautiful home of Seattle to move to the “other” coast.

My first experiences in journalism began when I was in the womb. My mother has been a journalist for almost 30 years and now works for one of the two major papers in Seattle, so as a child I was attending journalism conferences in various cities and also going to work with my mom on my days off from school. (I think it was her subliminal way to get me to go into journalism. My dad, a potter, made no efforts to entice me into his profession.)

In high school I was involved with the paper, dealing with everything from photography to writing, page designing and copyediting, all the while trying to balance my hectic sports schedule -- basketball and three other sports.

Once in college, at the University of Washington, I tried to stay away from journalism as long as I could, taking the most random classes to see what else sparked my interest -- but nothing did. By fall of my junior year, I relented and applied to the communications school. I was accepted in December, and then left in January for five months to live and study in Aix-en-Provence, France. I didn’t return to the UW until the start of my senior year, so I had a lot of catching up to do. I wrote briefly for my college paper and then began applying for internships to gain real-life experiences.

At the end of my spring quarter, I began interning at a local weekly paper, The Enterprise, where I was able not only to write, but also to copy edit and run the feature section and a community news section while the editors were on vacation.

I graduated in June and ended my internship at The Enterprise a week later. I then went into an internship at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle’s oldest major newspaper, where I worked as an unpaid, entry-level reporter. During my 10 weeks at the P-I, I was able to write a variety of news stories, from dailies to longer features that ran as the Seattle section centerpiece.

I am both excited and nervous for my Scripps Howard Foundation internship. Having never written for a wire service before, I am nervous about deadlines, but I also am excited to be living in such a political city. During this internship, I want to continue working on my writing, while also making future job connections. Although my heart and home are in Seattle, I know that to start my career as a reporter I need to move wherever I can find a job. Ultimately I want to live in Seattle and be an assistant managing editor, a managing editor or publisher.

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