Alum
Samantha Schmidt
From teenage dream to The Washington Post
BAJ’16, The Washington Post’s Bogotá bureau chief
“I graduated from IU in 2016, and ever since, I’ve been working at The Washington Post. I currently am a reporter, the Bogotá bureau chief for The Washington Post in Colombia. I cover all of Spanish-speaking South America basically. It’s a lot of trying to explain a continent to readers who are very far away who might not have any idea of what’s going on in these countries.
The most formative experience I’ve had early on as a reporter at The Washington Post was covering Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. I was 23 years old, just getting started, and I offered at the last minute if the editors needed help covering the hurricane, and they said, ‘Can you get on an airplane right now?’ I had never covered a hurricane before, and I’d never been to Puerto Rico before, but I spoke Spanish, and my editor told me, ‘It’s just like any other story, just go report the story.’
I can’t really think of a job I wanted to do before journalism. It’s basically been my dream since I was probably 14 years old. I think it was middle school when I remember sitting at an IKEA with my mom, and she suggested, ‘Why don’t you think about journalism?’ Then, I started trying it in high school working for my high school newspaper, which I was later the editor-in-chief of, the Trojan Tribune, and fell in love with it, and I picked Indiana University for that reason.
I took a class called Words and Pictures, which was probably one of the most formative experiences of my time at IU because it taught me how to work as a team with a photographer and a videographer, to put together an interactive project. I do that all the time now. I did that yesterday, while in Ecuador, interviewing the president of Ecuador. It’s something you don’t often learn how to do until you’re forced to do it yourself in this business. But working as a team, knowing how to not only write but to build a story together, was such an important and valuable experience.
If there’s something that you know better than anyone else — whether it’s ballet, video games, another language, or a life experience — you have a certain skillset or insight that other journalists don’t have, lean into that. Don’t be afraid to find opportunities to shine covering that area you know best.”
Written By McKenna Cardona
Photos By Michelle Rezsonya