A match made in The Media School
Media School educations have led to thousands of successful careers in the media industry. They’ve also led to a few marriages.
In celebration of Valentine’s Day, a few Media School couples share their love stories.
Mark and Alison Skertic, BA’86
The night before graduation in the spring of 1986, Mark Skertic and Alison Schmidt met up with two other couples at the Rose Well House. As the clock struck midnight, the two leaned in for a kiss. Years later, they’d return to campus as their two daughters became Hoosiers themselves.
The Skertics first met during their junior year while working at the Indiana Daily Student. They worked at different desks and didn’t interact much, until their mutual friend saw an opportunity to engineer their mingling during a night out with friends.
“He kind of played Cupid,” Alison said.
Quickly after, they were studying together often in the lounge outside the IDS, bonding over a challenging class they were both taking.
“I think I fell for Mark when he explained Faulkner to me,” Alison said.
The two officially began dating the fall of their senior year, when Alison was the assistant sports editor at the IDS and Mark a campus editor. They spent their evenings with the rest of the staff at Nick’s after the paper went out. Or they could be found at the Video Saloon downtown, catching an old movie, before it rebranded as The Vid years later.
The day after their kiss in the Well House, they both graduated with degrees in journalism from the College of Arts and Sciences. Mark and Alison would go on to work as journalists across the Midwest, even working together at the Grand Rapids Press, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, the Northwest Indiana Times and the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Today, Mark works as a consultant at Berkeley Research Group. Alison teaches journalism at Merrillville High School.
The couple lives in Munster and visited campus in 2017 for the IDS’s 150th anniversary celebration, where they caught up with old friends.
Marilyn and David Shank, BS’73, BS’72
Marilyn Chance and David Shank pored over huge books as they studied for their courses together in the stacks of Franklin Hall in 1969, back when it was the campus library and long before it was the home of The Media School.
They were pursuing degrees in telecommunications, first bonding over the UPI teletype machine that delivered the news from the wire in the WFIU newsroom their freshman year in 1967.
That spring, David worked up the courage to ask Marilyn to grab a Coke with him at the Indiana Memorial Union. From then on, they were dating. Marilyn’s friends at Forest Residence Hall christened him David “No Car,” since several of Marilyn’s previous dates had cool cars, and David was lacking.
Despite the nickname, they were married in 1971 at a church across the street from Marilyn’s parents’ house in Indianapolis. They went on to careers in broadcast before migrating to public relations.
“Nothing about what we studied in Radio-TV was wasted,” said Marilyn of their time in the Department of Telecommunications.
The couple formed Shank Public Relations, where they worked together for three decades. They had adjacent offices at the building in Indianapolis, but never got tired of each other. Their kids would marvel at how they still wanted to talk to each other after a whole day of work together.
David still works at Shank, while Marilyn now works for Eskenazi Health. They love to come back to Bloomington and get strombolis at Cafe Pizzaria on Kirkwood and pick up a sugar cookie at the IMU, where they went on their first date so many years ago.
Mike Stephenson and Jennifer Orsi, BA’89, BA’88
Jennifer Orsi and Mike Stephenson began dating two months before Jennifer’s graduation in the spring of 1988 from the IU School of Journalism. The couple then entered what would be five years of long distance before tying the knot in 1994.
The young journalists met in 1986 at the IDS, when Mike was a freshman general assignment writer and Jennifer was the campus editor. That semester, Mike decided to sublet from Jennifer for the summer, and the two got to know each other. Their friend groups merged.
Jennifer realized she was developing feelings for Mike when she kept spilling coffee on herself whenever Mike was around.
Once the two finally began dating, Jennifer headed off to work at the St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times, where she worked for 30 years. Mike had an internship at another paper that summer in Jacksonville, Florida, only three and a half hours away.
They spent that summer traveling back and forth to see each other. In 1993, Mike wound up at the Tampa Bay Times with Jennifer, where Jennifer would become managing editor and Mike would serve as interim sports editor.
“It helped us through the years (that) we were both working in journalism, because we understood the pressures the other was under,” Jennifer said.
Jennifer left the Times this past October to do content marketing for Carillon Tower Advisers. Mike left in 2016 and is now the editorial manager at John Hopkins All Children’s Hospital.
While they haven’t been back to campus in 20 years, their son is about to look for colleges. They think they might make it back to Bloomington soon.
Natalie and Matt Dollinger, BAJ’10
An empty campus at the end of summer made the wedding of Natalie Avon and Matt Dollinger at the IU Auditorium in 2013 feel like a dream.
“I felt like we had the whole campus to ourselves … it was just a reunion at our favorite place in the world,” Natalie said.
This Hoosier couple loves Bloomington, returning every year since graduating. Their wedding party even ate breakfast at The Village Deli and took the after-party to Nick’s.
Natalie and Matt both graduated with journalism degrees in 2010. They moved to Atlanta after graduation for Matt’s new job at Sports Illustrated. When they decided to make the move together, Natalie said she knew this was a serious, adult relationship.
The couple now lives in Brooklyn. Matt works as an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated. Natalie is a product marketer at Facebook.
They began humbly as a couple in the IDS newsroom in fall 2007 when Natalie recognized Matt from his football column. She told him how much she liked the column. In the coming months, they were partnered for a hot chocolate cook-off, which they did not win.
Despite the loss, they started dating in fall 2008. They’ve now been married for five years and have a 7-month-old son.