Department prepared alum for broadcast career
Saadia Van Winkle, a 2003 graduate of the Department of Communication in Journalism, could serve as a role model for any student hoping to use her UW education to break into broadcast journalism.
Although she originally feared that the Journalism Program had prepared her more for a career in print than broadcast, Van Winkle soon found that a solid background in the fundamentals was more than enough preparation.
Beyond having an education geared specifically toward broadcast, “You need to have a core idea of what it means to be a great journalist,” Van Winkle said.
And her time at UW gave her just that.
All the professors in the Journalism Department “have a lot of integrity that the rest of the world doesn’t have,” according to Van Winkle. “When you’re at UW, you want to aspire to be like those professors.”
Of the educators she worked with during her undergraduate career, Don Pember and Mike Henderson stand out in her mind as being the most inspirational.
Van Winkle fondly remembers rearranging her schedule so that she could enroll in every class offered by Professor Pember. “He told the greatest stories,” she said, recalling the one about Pember’s opportunity to interview John F. Kennedy in an airplane hangar. She also credits him with “introducing me to some of my idols,” when he passed out a list of books written by journalists that he believed every aspiring journalist should read.
As for Mike Henderson, she remembers him as a “no holds-barred type.” She said he was “frank and scary—but in a good way. You need to have professors like that, because that’s the way life is.”
After she graduated from UW, Van Winkle went to graduate school at the University of Miami. Shortly after graduation she went to work as a reporter for CTV, a Maryland news station, where she is currently employed.
She has interviewed the governor of Maryland, Jesse Jackson and even Barack Obama. The best part of her job, she said, is that “I meet these people who are incredible and they inspire me.”
She also said that sometimes the best interviews are ones that she initially doesn’t even want to do. Although she has interviewed some of the biggest names in American politics today, one that stands out in her mind as especially poignant is her interview with a 4-year-old boy she met covering the Special Olympics. “My favorites are the people who have really great stories,” she said.
Van Winkle has some advice for aspiring journalists: “You have to be proactive,” she said. “The world needs more people who really want to be journalists.”
About succeeding in journalism, she said, “You have to beg, tooth and nail, to get there. But once you do, it’s so great.”
