Introduction to an aspiring journalist

Hello! My name is Dana Branham, and I'm from College Station, Texas. I'm in my final semester at OU (if all goes well!), and I'll be graduating with a degree in journalism and a minor in computational technology. I also am spending this semester as the enterprise editor of the OU Daily (I was the editor-in-chief last year, which was the best job ever) and as a reporting intern at Oklahoma Watch.

I think the coolest thing about what I do is that journalism is probably the most exciting, ever-changing industry to go into. Every day, I get to learn about new things and make that knowledge accessible to people around me.

I also love how many cool fields can intersect with journalism. For example, last semester I took a GIS class, where we learned to analyze data by creating maps. We learned to use the programming language R to do more heavy-lifting analysis, which I thought was so cool. I saw so many practical applications to learning map-making for journalism. Programming, too. I've taken a few programming classes at OU, but I haven't loved them. They've given me a solid foundation in programming basics, but I never felt like I was learning anything practical enough to apply to my field of interest. Over the summer, I took a free online course that taught Python specifically for data journalists, and I loved it. I learned to write code that helped me analyze data, explain my findings and publish that to the web.

This is me in August 2017.
Photo by Alexa Philippou, a fellow Cincinnati intern.

Over the summer, I was in Cincinnati doing an internship at the Cincinnati Enquirer. My internship was social media-focused, but I got to do quite a bit of reporting, which I love. One of the most challenging moments of the summer was covering a community gathering and subsequent funeral for Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who had been detained in North Korea for over a year. I didn't know this at first, but Warmbier was from a small town called Wyoming, about 20 miles north of Cincinnati. He was released from North Korea in a coma, and died a few days after he got home. I was there, along with a lot of national and international media members, amid a grieving tight-knit community. I never expected to be able to cover something like that, but I hope I did it justice.

Aside from my journalistic endeavors, I'm also a just person! I love spending time with my family when I can be back in Texas and visiting my boyfriend when he's able to come back to Oklahoma or when I can make it out to Kentucky. I miss them (and my dogs, Scarlett and Rory) all the time. I love cozy coffee shops, stationery, pretty journals, candles and learning about fonts. I used to play the saxophone, but I haven't in quite a while. I've tried to teach myself guitar to no avail, but I do still listen to a lot of different types of music.

Last, I'm looking forward to this class — I haven't done any creative writing in a long time, so I'm excited for what's to come this semester.