Jie Jenny Zou

Stony Brook University

For Jie Jenny Zou, journalism is about exploring the kinds of stories her family never told. She left China when she was 3 to join her father in Brooklyn, where he had opened a Chinese restaurant. He rarely talks about his difficult life in China, Zou said, so she has always been drawn to telling other people’s stories.

Zou, 21, originally set out to study environmental engineering at Stony Brook University in New York, but she became interested in journalism after taking a news literacy course as a freshman. In 2009, the summer after that class, she returned to China for the first time since she was a little girl, on a journalism study-abroad program. While in China, she covered ethnic tensions in the restive western province of Xinjiang.

“That was the first time I felt like a real journalist,” Zou said. “I cared about it.” She said having come from a place she doesn’t fully know drives her curiosity about the world.

Soon Zou’s focus shifted to multimedia storytelling — a chance to “explore different avenues and angles” of an issue, she said. Now she’s a senior double majoring in journalism and political science, and the executive editor of the Stony Brook Independent, the university’s student-run news Web site. In 2010 she worked as a news assistant to Gabe Pressman, a veteran reporter at WNBC-TV, covering a variety of stories including one on homelessness in New York City. And during a summer internship at The Chronicle of Higher Education last year, she covered technology. Zou has also been accepted for an internship this summer at The Wall Street Journal.

For Zou, life as a reporter is much more appealing than a 9-to-5 job because every day brings a new challenge. “You can’t do the same thing twice,” she said. But being able to share human experiences is most important to her. “I don’t want it to ever be about me,” she said.

- Carol Moran