On April 15th, the Communications Connect Team at the Hamilton College Career Center hosted a zoom panel showcasing four Hamilton Alumni who work in varied journalism-related careers. John Boudreau ’14 majored in history and is currently the senior strategist of The Additive Agency and is a freelance writer who has experience in public relations and marketing. While at Hamilton, Boudreau was the Editor-in-Chief of the

Duel Observer

. The

Duel

also gave him the experience and lessons of leading a publication. Boudreau continued his studies in graduate school at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse.

Also a member of the class of 2014, Bonnie Wertheim is a senior staff editor for the Style section of

The New York Times

, where she has worked in varied capacities for over six years. At Hamilton, Wertheim studied English, and in her final year, she was the Editor-in-Chief of

The Spectator

, which like Boudreau found to be a tremendous opportunity because of the freedom she had. “There was never anything too small or too big to cover in

The Spectator

,” she stated. In addition to

The Spectator

, Wertheim worked for the Career Center as a peer advisor, where she edited resumes and cover letters.

The next panelist, Charles Dunst, graduated in 2018 with a degree in World Politics and currently works as an associate at the geopolitical risk firm Eurasia. Before that he worked as a freelance journalist where his work was published in

The New York Times

and

The Atlantic

. Like Wertheim, Dunst worked on

The Spectator

and also became the Editor-in-Chief, which not only improved his editing skills but also taught him managing skills. After graduating, Dunst attended The London School of Economics, where he received a Master’s degree in International Relations. Dunst, who has spent time covering stories in Southeast Asia, discussed learning about how to properly approach telling a story about those whose culture is not yours. He remarked this as something heavily considered by journalists today, but not as much by their predecessors.

The final panelist, Michelle Chung ’20, is an assistant in the Speakers Bureau at Simon & Schuster and previously worked in their publicity department. Chung is not the only Hamiltonian in these departments: Brian Belfiglio ’90 oversees the Speakers Bureau and is the Vice President of Publicity. Unsurprisingly, Chung also wrote for

the Spectator,

worked at the Career Center in marketing, and co-founded the Vietnamese Student Association.

As evident, each panelist graduated from Hamilton relatively recently, which had the effect of making journalism feel refreshingly more accessible: they had not so long ago written for this very publication. As a consequence of being so new to the field, they understand the difficulties facing print journalism today and how to properly portray a story about subjects of a different culture than your own.

The panel began with each panelist introducing themselves and their current career, but it quickly devolved into a fluid discourse guided by Lindsey Royce ’22 and Vige Barrie, the senior director of Media Relations. Each of the panelists bounced off of each other’s ideas and later took questions from Hamilton students, offering participants a thoroughly engaging panel.

While there were many important takeaways, the panelists all emphasized to all of the Hamilton students with the hopes of being journalists that they should learn to accept rejection and be extremely open-minded. If someone gives you an assignment: do it. They all agree that the only way to get better is to keep practicing your skill. As Boudreau summarized, “Never turn down a connection. Pitch like crazy. And don’t take rejection personally.” As for being open-minded many students, including myself, believe that to do real journalism, you have to be in a major city where things are always happening. But regardless of where you are, Wertheim noted, “you need to have a big imagination about where things happen and what parts of the world or America are important. The center of the world is where the news happens that day. And sometimes that is in central New York.”