"To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live."
– Hans Christian Andersen My name is Kate, and the quote above speaks to me on a spiritual level. I grew up in a small suburb (2.4 square miles, or 3.8 square kilometers) of Columbus, Ohio, USA and spent most of my young life trying to go anywhere but there. If I had told my young, overly-impatient self that by age 24 I would travel to more than 20 different countries in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, I may or may not have believed it. But here I am, living it up in Leipzig, Germany.
Storytelling is part of who I am. I studied journalism in college, and graduated from Ohio University in December 2015 with a B.S. in Journalism and a B.A. in Spanish after just 3.5 years. Though I haven't wanted to be a traditional journalist (what does that even mean anyway?) for years now, I plan to take my experiences and skills and put them to good use in another context. I've held "traditional" media internships in magazine and radio reporting, produced a 15-minute documentary for the Ohio Newspaper Association, coordinated entrepreneurship and leadership workshops halfway around the world, photographed sporting events, wrote for a newspaper and contributed to various blogs, developed social media marketing strategies for clients with disabilities, directed a 4-day journalism workshop for 120+ high school students, taught introductory journalism courses for college freshmen and an advanced multimedia practicum for upperclassmen, was part of the 2016 German-American Fulbright Commission's Berlin Capital Program, spent two summers producing content and managing various social media platforms for the National Student Leadership Conference, and worked remotely as an intern for the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (EUR/PD) while completing my two master's degrees (a M.A. in Global Mass Communication from Universität Leipzig and a M.S. in Journalism from Ohio University), and am just beginning my PhD in Amerikanistik at Universität Leipzig. Phew. I sometimes wonder if I ever sleep. Want to connect? Email me at [email protected] or follow me on Instagram: @kmhiller527. |
The Grand Canyon is in fact quite grand. And I am quite small.
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