A railroad station on campus makes it easy for Jael to get into New York
City and catch up on her reading.
Student portraits by David Roberts
“The future is not as hard as it seems. I had to totally change my schedule to make the internship work out. My fantasy is they’ll keep me on after it’s over.”
—Senior, English major, journalism minor
As Stony Brook’s first-ever Dow Jones Newspaper Fund intern, Jael Fogle works the night shift at the sports desk of The Journal News in White Plains, New York, in the summer. The winner of the national journalism competition leaves her home in Queens, New York, at 5:00 p.m. and does not return until dawn. Most of the paper’s staff is gone by the time she gets to work, and she has heaps of articles to edit. But Jael doesn’t mind.
Traveling for something she loves is not new for Jael. She has been commuting 50 miles to college by train since her freshman year. Her original plan was to be a physician’s assistant, but after one semester she decided that a career in science was not for her. Then she signed up for a journalism class with Barbara Selvin and loved it.
When Alfreda James, Internship Program Manager at the Career Center, visited Jael’s journalism class during her junior year to talk about the internship, Jael didn’t apply. “I thought maybe it would be too hard,” says Jael. “This year I tried it, and look what happened.” Although she had never worked on the student newspaper and had no clips to show, her essay and the results of her editing test put her at the very top of the competition, and she became one of only 12 such interns in the entire country.