Hana Bieliauskas - Summer 2007

Click on photo to enlarge or download: Hana BieliauskasI was one of those rebellious kids who put off sleep to hide in the stairwell while my parents watched the evening news, trying to hear snippets while balancing my weight to keep the stairs from creaking. Sometimes, I would even snatch one of my mom's Newsweek magazines and try to understand the stories, especially the ones she didn't really want me to know about "until I was older."

I've aged about 15 years, but I guess some things never change. There is no tearing me away from the news, and political magazines are still at the top of my reading list. Only now, I'm going to be the one reporting news all summer - straight from Washington.

Washington is a slight change from the quiet suburbs of my hometown, Cincinnati, and it is certainly a switch from living in small-town Athens, Ohio, where I am a senior magazine journalism major at Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. But I enjoy it because something is always happening, and getting my new Washington press pass on my first day was like getting a key to an exciting new world that never sits still and always has something to report.

Maybe that's part of why I like journalism so much. There's only a dull moment if you make one, and that's tough when there are always so many stories. My first internship was at Cincinnati Magazine, where I quickly scrapped my opinion that Cincinnati was "boring" when I discovered how much can be written about one city and that some of the best stories come from places you'd least expect.

My next internship was a few miles outside the Ohio borders in London. While studying abroad for a semester, I interned at The New Statesman magazine in the online department where I learned the ins and outs of British politics, which, I found out, is much different from American politics. Despite my knowledge of the online medium after being a writer, copy chief and blogs editor at OU's first online magazine, Speakeasy, I found myself learning new online strategies every day.

Now I'm back in the politics game, but this time I'll be reporting to you about the events on Capitol Hill instead of the halls of Parliament.

And you can bet I won't be hiding in the stairwell.

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Reach Hana Bieliauskas at shws5@shns.com or (202)326-9865.