Samantha Esquivel

University of Arizona

Samantha Esquivel, 23, got her start in journalism as a photographer but said she became intrigued by the “idea of putting images in motion.”

So Esquivel, a senior at the University of Arizona majoring in broadcast journalism and minoring in Mexican-American studies, found her way to video journalism.

A Tucson native, Esquivel grew up the daughter of a Pueblo homemaker and a Mexican-American postal worker father. During her senior year in high school, she was a photo intern at the Arizona Daily Star.

“I got inspired to pursue photography in more than an aesthetic sense,” she said. “It made me want to document something.”

After graduating from high school, she attended Pima Community College and worked for the Aztec Press, where she took photographs and reported. In the summer of 2011, she was a multimedia intern at the Tucson TV station KOLD News 13, where she worked behind the scenes, putting together news packages.

The experience was demanding. In just one week she helped with a follow-up story on the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, as well as stories about a boy’s murder along the U.S.-Mexico border, wildfires, and bats inhabiting an old post office.

Esquivel will be an intern at KGUN 9, another TV station in Tucson, until May, when she will graduate. Her goal is to get a position as a television news reporter.

She said she feels lucky to be at The New York Times Student Journalism Institute and to be a journalist. “Journalists have an assumed trust from the public,” she said. “I appreciate that every day.”

Esquivel is also an animal lover. She works as an animal technician at the Humane Society of Southern Arizona and has two Shetland Sheepdogs: Layla Blue, 4, and Isabella Rouge, 6.

- Lazaro Gamio