From the Desks to the Mic

It wasn’t until a student stood up in class to discuss the Boston bombings that Jacklyn Kim decided to become a journalist.

The student was from Syria and asked the class why everyone knows when two people die in the U.S., but no one knows about the thousands of people dying in her country.

Kim always avoided the news but she was struck by her classmate’s sobs on the subject. At that moment, Kim Googled the crisis in Syria and couldn’t fathom what was going on there. It was then that she decided to go into journalism.

“I think it was that moment when I realized… I felt a sense of responsibility,” Kim said.

Kim graduated from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2016 and is currently working as the Apprentice News Clerk for 89.3 KPCC’s “AirTalk with Larry Mantle” (Southern California’s longest-running daily talk program).

Kim is also working alongside fellow alumna Audrey Ngo, who graduated in 2015. Ngo works as the Assistant Producer at KPCC (the nation’s most listened-to NPR affiliate station) for “AirTalk.”

During her time there, Ngo took part in the 2016 presidential election coverage, had feature and news segments on KPCC’s “Take Two,” as well as their arts and entertainment program, “The Frame.”

While at CSUDH, Ngo won the Top Journalist Student Award and won first place in her division for Student Research Day looking at the news coverage of the Ferguson protests.

Ngo was a part of the inaugural staff that launched csudhbulletin.com. She was also an intern at CSUDH’s on campus radio station KDHR, where she created the podcast, “Thinking Aloud.”

Both Kim and Ngo are in awe of how their careers have turned out after college.

“I always wanted to work there [KPCC],” Ngo said. “I always listened to KPCC… I loved the structure of their programming. It really was a dream job.”

KPCC was also a radio station that Kim and Ngo had listened to before their career endeavors in broadcast news started.

Enjoying being able to engage with an audio story and knowing that she learns best through listening, Ngo quickly realized that radio broadcasting was the field she wanted to go into.

After Kim’s introduction to the world of news is when she stumbled upon KPCC.

“I just really liked listening to it,” Kim said. “I got hooked on listening to the radio and reading the news. I caught the news bug.”

Both Kim and Ngo credit CSUDH and their professors for preparing them for the news-intense careers they have now.

The class sizes at CSUDH are small and the professors not only make sure the material is understood, but they also make personal relations with the students, Ngo said.

They both also said they believe that the internship requirement for Communications students is crucial to the curriculum. This is because it then gets students to start networking in the fields that they are studying, Kim said.

Before her job at AirTalk, Ngo landed an internship at the City News Services Orange County bureau with the assistance of Tony Dodero, lecturer for the Communications Department.

Joel Beers, lecturer for the Communications Department, assisted Kim in receiving an internship with the Orange County Weekly, where she was a food reviewer and local reporter. The summer following her internship at the OC Weekly, Kim was hired for NPR’s “All Things Considered” in Washington D.C. with a recommendation from Dr. Brant Burkey, Assistant Professor in the Communications Department.

During her internship with NPR in D.C., Kim’s duties included pitching story ideas at editorial meetings, booking interviewees for segments, conducting pre-interviews, writing scripts, cutting audio for the segments, and many more tasks.

“If it wasn’t for the internship requirement, I would have never looked up internships and I would have never worked at the OC Weekly or NPR or even got this job at KPCC,” Kim said.