I am a senior writer at a liberal arts college by Seneca Lake, the deepest of the Finger Lakes, on a campus so lush and cinematic, I sometimes wonder if it's real.
At Hobart and William Smith in Geneva, NY I interview mainly professors and students and write about a wide range of research: geology, psychology, physics, architecture, art, robotics, music, anthropology, artificial intelligence, ecology, economics, philosophy.
Prior to HWS, I was a writing professor at St. John Fisher University and Rochester Institute of Technology, where over the course of six years, I taught more than 900 college students. On the side, I worked as an interpreter for hospital patients from Africa and the Caribbean.
Before that, I was a newspaper beat reporter and magazine editor for more than a decade. But that's the short version.
The long version starts in my twenties. I spent them in France as an undergrad, then in England getting my MBA and then back to France, where I became a naturalized citizen. I worked in Paris, first as a freelancer for fashion and cosmetic trade magazines at Condé Nast and later as a project manager for a communications agency serving mainly European luxury brands.
By 30, I wanted to come home, which at the time felt as difficult as moving to France had been as a college junior a decade before.
I was looking to combine my business and journalism degrees and found the perfect job in New York at the Rochester Business Journal, where an award-winning editorial team helped me develop my skills as an investigative reporter.
At the RBJ, I covered technology companies, architecture and engineering firms, the local media and publishing industry, the environment and half a dozen other beats, in addition to a handful of Rochester-based, publicly-traded companies. I became skilled at translating complex technologies and concepts to non-expert readers.
At 40, I was channeling my energy and skills into POST magazine, a print publication I helped develop to tell the story of an emerging Rochester economy, post-Eastman Kodak, post-Bausch & Lomb. As downsizing left workers to chart their own paths, POST showcased the creativity of new small businesses and insights from research at growing local universities.
With a team of passionate journalists, photographers, designers and illustrators, we published more than 25 print editions. Using photography and online video to complement the magazine, POST employed a documentary approach to capture the lives, perspectives and work of locals in the context of Rochester's larger problem--poverty.
As a quarterly, POST folded in late 2018, which marked the start of my teaching career.
Working with students, I discovered then, is one of my greatest joys; research and writing are two others.
At HWS, I get to combine all three. I write about how scholars look for gaps in human knowledge to shed light through collaboration and research—just like they teach their students to do.
