Miracle on Witherspoon Street

By Anhar Farag (North Bergen, NJ), Jessica Khaimova (Brooklyn, NY), Shellon Lambert (Jamaica, NY), Nick Marsico (Philadelphia, PA), and Soledad Mendoza (Round Lake Beach, IL)

Today’s lesson: Always keep your notepad handy, because you never know when you’re going to need it.

As we were walking down Witherspoon Street late this afternoon, we noticed flashing red and blue lights, police tape, and people gathering in the square near the public library. Following our journalistic instincts, we were compelled to investigate.

While interviewing those at the scene, we learned that an 86-year-old man had crashed his car into the wall of a parking garage on the far side of the square. The car was crushed—it was a marvel that the driver had survived. Equally shocking, people on the scene told us, was that none of those standing in the crowded square had been injured.

We spoke with firefighters, policemen and bystanders and will be following up on this story. Stay tuned for details in next week’s issue of The Princeton Summer Journal.

Happy 10th Anniversary!

Today, we're kicking off our 10th anniversary of the Princeton University Summer Journalism Program.

A photo from the early days (SJP Class of 2004)

In honor of this occasion, please read Richard Just's column from 2002: 'Prince initiates minority summer journliasm program'

Follow us on our journey on this blog, Facebook, Twitter (@PrincetonSJP), and Tumblr .

Congratulations to the PUSJP Class of 2010

SJP is designed to give students a taste of what life is like at one of the best colleges in the country — students live on campus and eat in one of the university's cafeterias — and to prepare them to apply to top schools. Students meet with Princeton's top professors as well as the school's president and its dean of admissions. Students attend seminars on every aspect of the college admissions process. They also take a practice SAT and attend an SAT class taught by Princeton Review. After students return home, program staff remain in contact with them, assisting them during the college application process and helping them to apply for journalism internships once they are in college.

So ... we are incredibly proud of all of our students for months of hard work and we wish them the best of luck as they embark on their new journey in the coming weeks as members of the Class of 2015 at their respective colleges.   

Tammy Chan - Syracuse (Emma Bowen Foundation Scholar at NBC)
Bianca Dennis - Columbia University
Brenda Duman - Yale University
Carissa Isabel Eclarin - University of Chicago
Elizabeth Gonzalez - Bowdoin College (NAHJ Soledad O'Brien Scholar)
Patricia Gutierrez - Swarthmore College
Shawdae Harrison - John Hopkins
Franklin Lee - Harvard University
Shaiesha Moore - Georgetown University (Gates Millennium Scholar)
Maria Paredes - University of Pennsylvania (Gates Millennium Scholar)
Yared Portillo - Swarthmore (Gates Millennium Scholar)
Antonio Regulier - SUNY Fredonia
Frances Richburg - Boston University
Tonya Riley - Brown University
Tashi Shuler-Drakes - Mount Holyoke
Alfonso Toro - Yale University
Melina Torres - Yale University
Charles Walker - American University
Imani E. Watson - Lake Forest College
Jonathan Wigfall - Syracuse University
Stephanie Zhou - New York University
Reem Abdou (SJP '10) - Swarthmore '14

A Four Year Internship with NBC: First Impressions as an EBF Scholar

By Tammy Chan (Queens, NY)

While most teenagers fantasize about becoming famous, I dreamed about becoming a journalist. More than anything in the world, that’s what I want and it’s all I want. I’m one of the fortunate ones who developed this storytelling passion early on and was able to dedicate most of my high school years taking a fighting chance to pursue a career path in this highly competitive market. Every journalism course I’ve taken, every journalist I have met, they all say the same thing: “Most people don’t make it, no matter how bad they want it.” That’s the truth. This is the economy and it just doesn’t need that many journalists. There are two routes you can take after hearing that: You can pursue another career path or you can do what I did – take it, run with it, and use it as motivation. If it’s against all odds that I make it, then I’m going to prove you wrong.

As young female minority, the odds of me succeeding are slim to none. The news anchors that appear every day on the morning and night news are predominately older Caucasian men. Not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m an 18-year-old Asian-American female. You don’t see any of that on TV let alone in the industry, period. However, I am confident enough to say that I’ve started my path to achieving my dreams early enough to have that safety net – to be able to make those mistakes I need to make in order to grow, to be able to trial and error my way through life’s endeavors, and for being able to test the waters before I have to stick to what I got. So I took the “warning” and ran with it. It’s a risk I was willing to take but how would I ever know if I never try.

Four years later, after proving myself worthy through gaining as much experience I could along the way, I made it to the first milestone of my life. No, it wasn’t my high school graduation, it was the idea that the Monday following my graduation, I would be an intern at the NBC New York – the top major news broadcast network. To be honest when I got the call mid-Monday morning in my guidance counselor’s office, I shed grateful tears as the HR assistant informed me that NBC had decided to hire me. Everyone in the office surrounding the phone, listening to the voice on the speaker list all the great advantages of being an Emma Bowen Foundation scholar. I was speechless, literally. I was overwhelmed with tears because this was something I worked four long years for. It was almost too good to be true.