The application for 2012 scholarships is now available! Download scholarship application here.
If you have questions about the scholarship program, contact coordinators Susanne Brunner at susannejbrunner@gmail.com or Stephanie Chuang at steph.chuang@gmail.com.
We’re proud to announce our 2011 scholarship winners!
Every year, AAJA SF awards up to $10,000 in scholarships to outstanding high school seniors and college students who live in or attend school in the Bay Area and who are interested in pursuing a career in journalism. Students are judged based on their journalistic ability, commitment to journalism, sensitivity to Asian Pacific American issues, financial need and scholastic achievement.
Congratulations to the 2011 winners:
Bo Hee Kim: This 24-year old Foster City native and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism student is heading into her second year, majoring in digital journalism. She impressed the judges with her passion and intelligence in her pursuit of working in journalism, and earned herself a $4,000 Ken Wong Memorial Scholarship. She is especially interested in Asian American health issues, which she feels are underreported in general. Notably, in 2009, she was a California Health Journalism Fellow and reported on Korean Americans with cancer in the Bay Area. The project itself was challenging on many levels, and she was hampered by the lack of research available on the subject. She became more aware of what it means to be Asian American and the need for more diversity in many areas, including in mainstream media. Bo Hee has also interned at New America Media, Washington Post’s Live Online Discussions desk and has worked at an online editor for Newzwag, a subsidiary of Agence France-Presse. With this scholarship, she says she can continue focusing energies on school and not on finding a part-time job, which she would have had to do. She plans to become more involved with AAJA SF once she graduates.
Jessica Lum: Another UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism heading into her second year, this 23-year old Sacramento native has a special focus centered on visual and multimedia journalism. Her ambition and love for what she does translated so well that the judges decided to award Jessica a $2,000 Willie Kee
Memorial Scholarship. A member of AAJA since her undergraduate years at UCLA, she says she truly values the organization for providing resources and networking for journalists, as it is such a crucial time for journalists to support each other and our profession. As a student, she has felt overwhelming support from members. She plans on using the scholarship toward her second year at school and also to fund part of her masters project.
Priscilla Yuki Wilson: Discovering stories was always this 20-year old’s passion, but it wasn’t until recently that Priscilla realized she loved sharing them with others through journalism. Now she’s so grateful she decided to take that first radio class. This Mills College student interviewed her grandmother in Japan
after the disaster struck, and as able to edit it into a beautiful radio piece aired on the radio! She says she’s al about “discovering the story of the next door neighbor,” and truly appreciates being able to build a beautiful story around an everyday person. Capturing more of these stories is one of her goals with the $2,000 she won this year.
Lauren Wilson: This Stanford junior was so impressive to the judges that she won a $1,000 scholarships, even after winning one last year. After balancing the various factors that were used to determine the scholarship winners, it was clear that Lauren deserved to be another recipient. The Southern California native
talked a lot about her passion for journalism and for pop culture. Lauren has interned at the Orange County Register, Stanford Daily and NBC Bay Area. She says this scholarship “will be an unbelievable help” to her for her next year at the prestigious private school.
Betty Tran: Embarking on a new chapter of her life as she faces freshman year at Chapman University, this 18-year old from Richmond already knows she wants to major in History and minor in Broadcast Journalism. Betty is no stranger to AAJA programs! As a J Camp ‘09 alumna, Betty was a reporter and intern for Youth Radio in Oakland where her where her radio commentaries were broadcasted on national outlets including KCBS and NPR. She is a native Vietnamese speaker, and is currently learning Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.
With the support of AAJA and the $500 scholarship, Betty hopes to become a broadcast television journalist and show the world the different flavors of Asian Americans.
Alvand Abdolsalehi: He’s only 20 years old, but Alvand is already heading into his second year at the UC Hastings College of the Law. Hailing from Buena Park, he calls himself a triple threat: a journalist, a news consumer, and a law student. He is attending law school in hopes of building a skill set that will help him positively impact the field of journalism and its beneficiaries. He stresses that wants to promote objectivity throughout each newsroom and eliminate the subjectivity that plagues its journalists. More personally, Alvand worries that the AAPI community is currently in great need of accurate representation, especially given the devastating events taking place in the Middle East. He is hopeful that having both a journalism and a legal background will enable him to inspire the journalism community to re-engage in relentless news coverage of the AAPI community without fear of legal persecution. He credits being a member of AAJA with opening his eyes to such inaccurate representation. This $500 AAJA scholarship will help him continue my journey by providing him with additional resources to finish law school, continue reporting on local and national events in San Francisco, and launch a career in journalism upon graduation.
A special thanks to our judges this year: Colleen Chen - KION/KCBA news anchor; LiPo Ching - San Jose Mercury News photographer; Connor Jay - Salinas Californian photographer; Sharon Noguchi - San Jose Mercury News reporter.
We want to thank everyone for supporting our annual fundraisers by attending the events, bringing family and friends, donating, volunteering or bidding on silent auction items. This scholarship program would not be possible without your support and the support of our event sponsors.