Alumni Spotlight
Where are they now?
When you think back on your college days, do you ever stop and wonder what happened to that girl you used to sit next to in Media Law, where the Editor in Chief of the Mustang Daily ended up, or what became of that hot guy who worked at KCPR? If yes, then you've come to the right place. The Alumni Spotlight features three journalism alumni and includes where they are now and how being a jounalism grad helped them in their careers.
Amanda Clardy (Graduated 2008)
Amanda Clardy currently has a job in Paso Robles in the Santa Cruz Biotechnology Publications Department. She got the job in July 2008, a month after graduation, and she is up for a review soon. She’s doing very well there, and she has an open offer to work full-time, but her hours are presently limited since she currently lives in Arroyo Grande and is going through some long-term physical therapy. Clardy had a small article published in a local arts and crafts magazine, Live Artfully, and also did some pro-bono work with AR &Co., the small public relations and marketing firm in Paso Robles, for the Boys and Girls Club.
Clardy uses her journalism degree mainly in relation to editorial skills, but found that having a familiarity with Quark also proved helpful, since that is the program her department uses to design the datasheets that they publish in their product books and on their Web site. It is a great environment and she is very thankful for it.
“While it is hard to think too far ahead in this economy and feel any sense of certainty, I know I don't regret my time at Cal Poly for a moment,” Clardy writes. “It was one of the most valuable times of my life. I am the first in my family to go through college. I didn't realize what a big deal that was until the act was accomplished, but what made me the most proud was that my brother decided to go back to school because he now believed he could make it just like I did.”
Clardy plans to take everything day by day, and she and her boyfriend, also pictured above, are planning to be engaged in the near future.
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Donna Taylor (Graduated 1990)
Donna Taylor has been managing editor for Kaiser Permanente’s Member and Marketing Communications (MMC) Department for ten years. She manages their main member publication, Partners in Health, which provides health tips and trends to their three million member households every quarter. The newsletter is produced in thirteen editions and translated into eleven languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Vietnamese. She also supervises Kaiser Permanente's Due Diligence Team, which coordinates the legal and regulatory review of MMC’s approximately 3,000 annual projects.
Whenever Taylor has told a prospective employer or professional colleague that she has a Cal Poly degree, the level of interest always increases. Her “learn by doing” experience of working as a reporter and editor for the Mustang Daily, and her two summer internships with newspapers, were some of her most valuable experiences. Receiving her Cal Poly degree was one of the best things she ever could have done for her career.
"Back in the mid-1980s, computers were just being integrated on Cal Poly's campus, and a huge, clunky machine called the Unisetter would spit out long columns of copy that had to be cut and pasted to make up Mustang Daily pages," Taylor writes.
Taylor has fond memories of going to Spike's Bar downtown on Fridays with several editors and reporters after a long week producing the Mustang Daily. Three of those same fellow grads now work with Taylor at Kaiser Permanente. April Karys is a consulting services supervisor in MMC (Taylor referred her to the job three years ago); Doug DiFranco is senior communication specialist at KP's Modesto Medical Center; and Terry Lightfoot is Modesto's senior community and government relations representative.
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Teresa Mariani Hendrix (Graduated 1985)
Teresa Mariani Hendrix is the Web Team Leader for University Advancement at Cal Poly. She serves as the content editor for the Cal Poly News Web site (www.calpolynews.calpoly.edu) and PolyLink (www.calpolylink.com), and she creates the university's monthly e-Newsletter, Cal Poly Update. Update won a 2005 Bronze Award and a 2008 Gold Medal Award of Excellence in e-communications from CASE VII (the professional organization for communications in higher education). She works in the Public Affairs Office at Cal Poly, and she also helps teach other staffers in University Advancement how to create and maintain Web pages. She works with another journalism alum in Public Affairs, Media Relations Specialist Matt Lazier.
“My job is really similar to that of a Web editor at a newspaper: take stories about Cal Poly and put them online with art on a news Web site,” Hendrix writes. “It's fun because it really is a lot like putting a newspaper on the Web.”
“I'm really lucky that I went to Cal Poly in the ‘Jim Hayes’ era. ‘Mister’ Hayes terrorized all J-students with his red pen – but in a good way. He'd take your stories, strip off the names and put them on an overhead projector in class (it was that long ago). He'd take his red pen and edit (more like shred) the stories in front of the class while talking about what was right and what was wrong with the story. You could suffer in relative anonymity. You REALLY learned how to write in his classes, and he's been a mentor to me ever since. He has really been a huge influence on hundreds of journalism alumni.”
In the future, when Hendrix wins the lottery, she plans to write novels.
Photo: Mustang Daily editors from the 1980s got together to at Avila Beach recently. L-R: Jesse Chavarria, Dave Wilcox, Mary Hennessey Gresch, Daryl Teshima, Teresa Mariani Hendrix, and Jill Perry Teshima. Photo courtesy Jill Perry Teshima.
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