Where it started

I chose Media Studies for my bachelor’s degree because I wanted to understand how information moves and how the stories we hear shape what we believe. The coursework covered a lot of ground. We read Marshall McLuhan and argued over what “the medium is the message” actually means. We studied semiotics. We also tried to keep up with social media, which was changing faster than the textbooks could.

The theory started to make sense once I put it into practice. I interned with Reuters in the Philippines and with the Philippine Information Agency, and that was my first real taste of journalism. I learned to chase down details, check facts and write about my own country clearly and fairly, which turned out to be harder than it sounds.

Later, I worked as a PR and marketing writer for a range of brands. It was a different kind of writing. I had to balance what a client wanted to say with what readers would actually pay attention to. Between the newsroom and the brand work, my love of reading and writing finally met the practical side of media.

Why International Development

For grad school, I switched to International Development. On paper it looks like a big change, but to me it made sense. I grew up in a developing country, so the problems this field studies, like economic hardship and inequality, were never abstract to me. I’d seen them up close.

Travel pushed me further in the same direction. Walking around Singapore, learning the history of Japanese cities and spending time in other parts of Southeast Asia showed me how differently countries develop, and how much their stories overlap.

In the end, what drew me to the field was the people more than the numbers. Development indicators matter, but behind every one of them are people’s lives. Journalism taught me to look for those stories close to home. Now I want to do the same thing on a bigger scale.

How the two fit together

I don’t see my media background as something I left behind. Development work runs on communication. A well-designed program can still fail if the people it’s meant to help don’t understand it or don’t trust it. Knowing how to tell a clear story, use visuals well and read public opinion are skills I already have, and they turn out to be useful here.

I also take seriously the responsibility that comes with telling other people’s stories. You can help people be heard, or you can flatten them into a statistic or a stereotype. I want to be the kind of storyteller who does the first.

So that’s where I am now: someone trained in media, learning how development works, and hoping to use both to do some good.

Hi everyone, it’s been a while. I doubt anyone has been refreshing the page waiting for an update, but here’s one anyway.

The short version is that grad school ate my life. I signed up for a full load of five courses this semester. It seemed ambitious when I enrolled and felt borderline crazy by week three. Somehow every deadline landed in the same stretch, and June turned into a blur of papers and late nights. I really do love reading and writing, and you’d think that would make all this easier. It didn’t.

I’ll be honest: there were a few breakdowns along the way. I got through all five courses, though, and four of them went well. The fifth is the one I kept putting off, and I ended up with a B+. It’s not a disaster, but I know I could have done better if I’d started earlier instead of telling myself I had plenty of time. Lesson learned, hopefully for good this time.

The moment I turned in my last paper, I went to a camp with my brother. Going straight from mental exhaustion to the physical kind probably wasn’t the most restful choice. But it got me playing table tennis again, which I’d dropped while school took over, and I’d forgotten how much I love it.

The bigger news is that I’ve started seriously thinking about a PhD. It’s still early. I’ve been looking at a few programs, and they’re the kind of schools that make me excited and nervous in equal measure. Some days I think I have a real shot, and other days I wonder if I’m reaching too high. I’d be thrilled to get into even one, so wish me luck.

There’s also something else in the works that I’m not ready to talk about yet. I don’t want to jinx it, but I hope I’ll have good news to share soon.

That’s where things stand. It’s been a rough couple of months, but I’m still here, and I feel a lot more ready for what’s next than I did in June. Thanks for sticking around, and talk soon.

Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is narrated by Death, and he isn’t the scythe-swinging figure you’d expect. He’s overworked and a little bitter about it, which makes sense because the story takes place in Nazi Germany during World War II. He’s also surprisingly gentle with the girl whose story he decides to tell.

That girl is Liesel Meminger. In 1939 she’s nine years old, riding a train with her mother and little brother to a foster home outside Munich. Her brother dies on the way. At his burial in the snow, a gravedigger’s apprentice drops a book called The Grave Digger’s Handbook, and Liesel picks it up. She can’t read yet. It’s her first theft, and everything else in the story grows out of it.

Her foster parents are Hans and Rosa Hubermann, who live on Himmel Street in the small town of Molching. Hans is a house painter with an accordion and endless patience. When Liesel wakes up screaming from nightmares, he sits up with her and teaches her to read from the gravedigger’s manual, painting new words on the basement wall. Rosa takes in washing for richer families and swears at everyone, Liesel included. It takes a while to see how much she loves the girl, and Zusak lets that come out slowly.

Then there’s Rudy Steiner, the boy next door. He worships Jesse Owens and spends most of the book asking Liesel for a kiss. And there’s Max Vandenburg, a young Jewish man who turns up at the door one night. His father saved Hans’s life in the First World War, so Hans keeps an old promise and hides Max in the basement. Max and Liesel bond over words. He paints over the pages of Mein Kampf and uses them to write and illustrate a story for her. It’s one of my favorite moments in the book.

Words are what the novel is really about. Liesel steals a book from a Nazi bonfire and others from the mayor’s wife’s library, and reading becomes how she gets through the war. But Zusak never lets you forget that Hitler rose to power through words too. The thing that keeps Liesel going is the same thing pouring out of the radios and rallies around her. Reading it now, when so much of what we read is people arguing online, made me think about how carelessly most of us use words.

The book is also honest about ordinary Germans. The Hubermanns take huge risks, but most of their neighbors cheer at the book burning, look away or just keep quiet. One day Hans hands a piece of bread to a Jewish prisoner being marched through town, and that one small act puts the whole household in danger. The fallout shows how much it costs to do the right thing when almost nobody else will.

Death’s narration is what sets this book apart from other WWII novels. Early on, he tells you who is going to die. You’d think that would ruin the suspense, but it does the opposite. You spend hundreds of pages dreading something you know is coming, and knowing doesn’t make the last chapters any easier. His final line, “I am haunted by humans,” sums up the book better than I could.

Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958, partly in response to European novels that treated Africans as background scenery. You can feel that purpose on every page. The book is set in Umuofia, a fictional cluster of Igbo villages in what’s now southeastern Nigeria, in the years just before and after British missionaries and colonial officers arrive.

At its center is Okonkwo, a man who has built his whole life around not becoming his father. Unoka was gentle, loved music and died in debt. Okonkwo has spent every year since proving he’s the opposite. He made his name as a young man by throwing a wrestler no one had beaten in seven years, and he earned his wives, his barns full of yams and his titles through sheer force of will. He’s also hot-tempered, quick to beat his wives and children, and terrified that anyone might think he’s weak.

That fear is behind the book’s most painful scene. Ikemefuna, a boy handed over to Umuofia to settle a dispute with a neighboring village, lives with Okonkwo’s family for three years and comes to call him father. When the Oracle declares the boy must die, an elder warns Okonkwo to stay out of it. He goes anyway, and when the moment comes he strikes the blow himself so no one will see him hesitate. His son Nwoye, who loved Ikemefuna like a brother, never really recovers.

The first part of the novel is full of daily life. There are harvest festivals, wrestling matches, marriage negotiations and a court where masked ancestral spirits settle disputes. People argue in proverbs, which Achebe calls “the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” None of it is exotic scenery. Umuofia is a working society with its own laws, religion and politics, and Achebe wants you to understand it the way the people inside it do.

He doesn’t pretend it’s perfect, either. Newborn twins are left in the forest to die. Outcasts have no place in the clan, and Okonkwo’s violence at home mostly goes unquestioned. So when the missionaries arrive, their first converts are often people the old order failed: outcasts, a woman who has lost four sets of twins, and eventually Nwoye. That’s why the collapse feels so real. At first Christianity doesn’t win by force. It wins by offering a place to the people the clan pushed out.

Okonkwo misses most of this happening. At a funeral his gun explodes and kills a teenage boy, the son of the same elder who warned him about Ikemefuna. As punishment he’s exiled to his mother’s village for seven years. By the time he comes home, Umuofia has a church, a colonial court and plenty of men who would rather trade than fight. Okonkwo wants to drive the white men out. The clan isn’t sure it can, or that it even wants to. I won’t give away what happens, but the final page, told from the point of view of a British official, is one of the most quietly brutal endings I’ve read.

If you’re picking it up for the first time, be patient with the opening chapters. They move slowly and read more like a series of village stories than a plot. That’s on purpose. By the time things start falling apart, you know exactly what’s being lost.

The book is short enough to finish in a weekend, and it’s one of the few classics that fully earns the label. Read it once for the story, then again once you know how it ends.