I am a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and plan to graduate in December 2003. I am majoring in photojournalism. in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and currently seeking a summer internship.

I have been interested in photography for as long as I can remember. My mother is a portrait photographer and it has been one of my grandmother's favorite hobbies. When we lived in Rockville, MD, my mother had a dark room and she would help me do some small projects.

We moved to Montclair, New Jersey when I was nine years old, where I continued to follow my photography interests. I took all the photography classes offered in High School as well as an independent study course. During February of my Junior year in High School, I participated in an exchange program to Ercolano, Italy, where we spent three weeks staying with families and traveling around the country. While I was thereI took a lot of pictures, but mostly artistic black and white photographs.

It was not until January of 2002 that I chose to major in photojournalism, and it happened in a roundabout way. I had never made the distinction between photography and photojournalism until that semester, when I took the basic photojournalism class here in the Journalism School. I had switched from majoring in Business to Graphic Design, remembering how much more fun it was to work with photoshop than statistics problems. As a graphic design major at UNC-CH, a student is required to take the basic course in the other two visual communication sequences, multimedia and photojournalism. It was only after taking this class that I realized the amazing opportunity before me. I did another semester of graphic design and photojournalism, to be sure I was making the right decision, and now I'm stuck! I couldn't imagine doing anything else.