This summer junior Mattea Vecera will attend the Medill Cherub program, a five-week summer journalism program at Northwestern University.

She first heard about this program from her mother, who was a graduate of the Northwestern class of 1994.

When Vecera was searching for summer programs, her mother told her to investigate the program at Northwestern.

“That night, I spent hours on their student-made website fascinated by the program and the stories from all the students involved last summer,” she said.

“I’d always loved to write and have been thinking about going into the field of journalism, potentially for film, media and/or broadcasting, but didn’t feel like I had enough experience to apply for something of the sorts in college,” said Vecera.

The program wants students with a “strong academic record and a strong background in journalism.”

The specific requirements are: ranking in the top quarter of your class, submitting a high school transcript, a letter of recommendation, submitting scores from the ACT, SAT, and/or PSAT, completion of your junior year of high school in May or June 2019, having evidence of a background in journalism, and a few more.

“It was quite a lengthy process, to say the least,” she said. “No more than 84 students are accepted each year.”

Through this program, Vecera hopes to gain more skills in journalism, “specifically in broadcast and online media.” She hopes to know by the end of the summer if she wants to continue studying journalism in college and have a career in this field.

This program will span five-weeks in Evanston, Illinois, on the Northwestern Campus. She will stay in a college dorm while “taking at least 50 classes ranging from lectures by Northwestern faculty and journalists from around the country to labs, workshops, and discussion groups and film showings, as well as field trips to Chicago.”

Vecera is under the impression most of her work will focus on “a large range of articles, being either news stories, features, or opinion pieces.”

Through all her hard work this summer, Vecera will get closer to making her dream of attending Northwestern a reality.  

Check out her work in the Online Tritonian: ndatritonian.com.