>> So I went to Penn State and I studied journalism here.
At the time, I thought I was going to work my way through the newspaper chains.
I thought I would start at a small paper, spend two years there, go to a midsized paper,
go there for two years, and then finally I'd end up at the Washington Post
or the Philadelphia Inquirer or some kind of dream newspaper like that.
And even though I am at the New York Times right now,
I did not follow the path that I thought I was going to.
I had, I was for four years a reporter at a midsized newspaper.
I moved to three different websites in between, and I always thought I was going to work
for dot coms before this opportunity on the digital side of the New York Times came up.
So it was a very different path than I expected.
I'm doing an entirely different craft than I thought I was going to,
but in the end both paths just meant I wanted to do quality journalism
and I've been lucky that I've been able to do that.
So my, after my sophomore year I got an internship at the Patriot-News in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania and after that internship I hopefully impressed my editors enough
that they were willing to give me writing assignments from here in State College.
So during the year when something big would happen at Penn State or they wanted a feature
from here on campus, they would call me up and say hey could you do this for us?
So the editors got to know me very well.
They got to see over and over that I was reliable,
that I met deadline, that my stories were clean.
And after graduation it just so turned out that somebody left at just the perfect time
so I was able to just slide into a reporting role there.
Very lucky.
I feel very, very fortunate that it worked out that way but that's,
again, it comes back to networking.
And I know them, they knew me.
They trusted me and I was able to slide in.