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Internship blog
DALLAS, Texas — Well, 12 weeks may seem like plenty of time. It’s really not. After working last week (week two), and getting my weekly evaluation, I’m feeling a sense of urgency to get my enterprise stories written. I have been working on one in particular that I want to wrap up. It’s been challenging getting a few details squared away, but if all goes well, I should be able to have it done next week.
Internship Blog
DALLAS, Texas — Week one of 12 down! Well, it’s one when your job is to take a red pen to the copy. It’s another thing when the red pen is taken to your own copy. Before I graduated, I was copy editing for The Prospector so the red pen was in my hand. It’s inevitable with being a reporter that editors go over your stories with the red pen.
Internship Blog
DALLAS, Texas — Well, I survived the first day. It started out routinely enough, I left way too early in the morning to make sure I wouldn’t arrive late. Driving on 635 in Dallas can be slow at best during rush hour so now I know how long it takes to get to work about 15 minutes early and not almost an hour early (unlike today). I met mostly everyone in the bureau and was happy to find that my colleagues have good senses of humor. —Newsrooms can be intense and it’s great when people can find a little humor in the small stuff.
EL PASO, Texas — It is The Prospector tradition that the graduating seniors write a goodbye column. So, now that my time here at UTEP is coming to a close, I can’t help but take a look back at my journey. Years ago, if anyone asked me what I was going to do with my life, I would not have had an answer. But now that I am graduating, I am excited to say that I have an answer to that question –a journalist. There are many people out there that will say that journalism is a dying field and that the odds of finding a job are slim. The truth is that journalism is an evolving field and this is a very exciting time to be entering the workforce.
EL PASO, Texas – Ana Cortez light-handedly drags a keen-edged glass cutter across a square of glass. She handles the glass like tissue paper, smoothly and easily, shaping and sizing the sheet to fit into its framework. Cortez used to fashion a dark brown braid, when she first started cutting, matting and assembling frames at the Art Center, 3101 E. Yandell, but now she’s older and experienced. With nearly 53 years of framing experience and a short white hairdo, she has seen a half-century of history pass through the glass of frames she works with. “I love what I do,” Cortez said.
EL PASO, Texas — The barbershop is hidden away from the hustle and bustle of the city on a side street at the corner of Piedras and Alameda that was created when the Piedras overpass and Interstate 10 highway were built in the mid 1960’s. Working inside, Estine Davis, an elderly but lively African-American woman who won’t reveal her age, has cut hair for decades. The wrinkles on her face and the countless plaques on the wall whisper tales of times long past. Davis is the owner of Estine’s Eastside Barbershop. For those familiar with this border city, this area is considered South Central El Paso.
EL PASO, Texas — I had a revelation today as I left the office of my advisor earlier this morning. I was walking out scrambling through my degree plan, which he had given me, when it all sank in. I will be done with school for good and finally have my college degree! This was surreal to me, as cliché as it sounds. It seems like just yesterday I was filling out my application and waiting for the acceptance letter from UTEP. Soon, I will be exposed to the real world, exposed to life.
EL PASO, Texas — Last summer, she traded in her sneakers for high heels in hopes of becoming Miss El Paso. A win meant gaining media exposure to launch her volleyball career and experience in front of the cameras for her journalism aspirations. It turned out to be the ace of her game. If being smart, talented, civic minded and articulate is what is needed to win beauty pageants, then UTEP Miner Kelsey Moore, who captured Miss Texas 2010 with no prior pageant experience, could just win Miss USA 2010 in Las Vegas this April. Although she entered the El Paso pageant with only one month to prepare, she astonished the pageant community by her intense focus and uncompromising determination to learn fast. She captured the Miss El Paso title in June and went on to win Miss Texas in September as well.
EL PASO — She stood five feet two inches tall in her sensible heels. With her short-cropped blonde bob and piercing blue eyes behind rounded spectacles, Esther Cano looked more like a school librarian than a scrappy fighter for human rights for women in crime-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. But Cano, who died of cancer on Christmas Day at age 75, could definitely deliver a mighty wallop and often did, taking aim at political indifference and the lack of legal and police protection for women victims of violence in Mexico. Some who gathered in El Paso recently to celebrate Cano’s life and activism remember her as, “an army of one.”
“She said she was not a saint or Mother Teresa but just a human-being fighting for justice,” said niece Marta Strobach. The diminutive “güera,” or blonde, as some friends affectionately call Cano, was largely responsible for bringing international media attention to the previously ignored murders of hundreds of women and girls in the scrappy border town of 2 million residents, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, TX.
EL PASO — El 25 de diciembre por la mañana que llamé a casa de Esther a ver cómo estaba, me enteré de la triste noticia de su deceso. Su partida en este día tan significativo para el mundo cristiano y para muchas de nosotras despertó en mí una reflexión que no acabo de elaborar. Estoy segura de que no es casual su muerte, precisamente el día que festejamos el nacimiento de Cristo. Tal vez sea una nueva esperanza. Conocí a la Güera a mi regreso a Juárez a principios de los ‘90 cuando acababan de pasar las elecciones para la alcaldía en las cuales ella había perdido con el PRD. Recuerdo que me dijo que sabía que iba a perder, pero que como ciudadanas teníamos que empezar a hacer algo para cambiar al país. Al poco tiempo me invitó a formar parte del grupo 8 de Marzo y nos reuníamos en la sala de rectores de la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (UACJ). Éramos un puñado de mujeres dispuestas a reclamar igualdad entre los sexos y los géneros.
EL PASO — The fall commencement at the University of Texas at El Paso in December was the first one I ever attend and it was my very own. I am a first generation college graduate, as well as a returning student. Twenty years ago when I first attended college at the age of 18, I had no idea how high the odds were stacked up against me. As it turns out, according to the Pell Institute only 11% of low-income, first generation students ever make it to graduation day. Being the first in my family to attend college means there was no one who had gone before me that could guide me through the tumultuous road. It was a foreign culture I did not navigate well. I didn’t even know what questions I to ask. I didn’t even know that I could drop classes if I were doing poorly. That mistake haunts me today since it still affects my G.P.A.
Only one adult in my life seriously spoke to me about going to college. It was my high school counselor who I still remember affectionately. He is the one who had college brochures and applications sent to my house. My grandmother, however, did not greet those brochures fondly. She saw them as a threat to the cohesiveness of her family. Mr. Joe Jacquez from Thomas Jefferson High School, has passed away since then, but I would like him to know, even though it took a while, his efforts eventually paid off because, I finally did it!
“They told me they rather give the [internship] to someone who was in print media,” Peña said. “That makes me mad. When someone tells me I cannot do something I have to do it.”
“Because their families are not wanting them to take that step of independence,” Shavers said. She explained that women of the border face special issues that people elsewhere wouldn’t such as health issues and mainly trying to find their identity as Mexican-Americans. “While their traditions are Mexican and they have a lot of language and culture, ethnic foods, and music and things, they are really more American than they are Mexican because their expectations, their rights as women are based heavily on what they live in the United States,” she said. Shavers said young women of Hispanic descent aren’t driven to succeed. They don’t get as much encouragement from their families to go off to college and become successful.
EL PASO — The competition was tough. Olympic runners Kara Goucher, Ryan Hall, Kenya’s Salina Kosgei, Ethiopia’s Deriba Merga and 26, 327 others were up against her in the 113th Boston Marathon. In the end, Stacey Sowards crossed the finish line ahead of 16,240 of them. While competition is a driving force behind her desire to run, her most difficult race, Sowards says, is “probably against myself. I’ve always been a competitive person, but also a perfectionist,” she says. “The worst part is when I compete against people and they don’t know it,” she laughs. “If I’m at the gym on the treadmill, I’ll hit the speed up and the people next to me don’t know.”
According to Sowards, an Associate Professor in the department of Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), the experience of “just being there” was more important than where she placed.