David Roza ’15 may be the subject of this story, but pretty soon he’ll be writing stories of his own. In August he is moving to New York to pursue a one-year masters program at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
The program will have Roza writing and reporting right away. “You’re a journalist even though you’re a student,” he says. “You’re the one pitching stories and writing them by the second semester.”
Roza was inspired to pursue a career in journalism by the “News and Feature Writing” course he took sophomore year at Bryn Mawr with Lecturer Tom Ferrick, a veteran reporter who was part of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team covering the Three Mile Island disaster.
“In the same way I’ll be expected to at Columbia, we had to go out and investigate stories ourselves,” says Roza of that class. “The beat I chose was ‘haunted houses.’”
Durning his time on campus Roza also wrote for The Clerk, an independent, online student newspaper. “[Founder] Thy Vo ’14 was just a great, dedicated journalist, finding new stories and encouraging others to write,” he says. “She inspired me to keep doing journalism at Haverford.” He also credits the English department with teaching him how to evaluate stories and Artist-In-Residence Vicky Funari’s video production courses for exposing him to different forms of media.
—Jack Hasler ’15
“Where They’re Headed” is a blog series reporting on the post-collegiate plans of recent Haverford graduates.
Photo Credit: Patrick Montero.