After growing up in Blue Springs, Mo., a glorious suburb of Kansas City, I attended the University of Missouri - Columbia, where I will graduate in May (2006) with a degree in newspaper journalism. I spent two years as a sports reporter for the Columbia Missourian, Columbia's city-wide paper, covering a variety of sports and sports-related issues. As a senior, I was the beat writer for the University of Missouri football team and also covered the men's basketball team, while also contributing to VOX, the Missourian's weekly magazine supplement.

During college, I completed two wonderful summer internships, one with the prestigious Price Chopper (a Kansas City grocery store chain) where I acted as a "cashier," and the other as a "test tube technician," which consisted of me examining 3,000-4,000 test tubes a day for defects in a hot, humid factory for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Unfortunately, both jobs left something to be desired, and so I am happy and honored to take a spot in Poynter's Fellowship for Young Journalists program. Since the day I picked up my frist R.L. Stine novel ("Say Cheese and Die II") as a wide-eyed fourth grader, there was really no question that I would one day become a writer. Since then, my passion for storyteling and understanding the human condition has only grown, and after my time at Poynter, I plan to point the old Chevy Lumina westward and not stop until I hit the coast, where I'll either find work as a sportswriter or earn a living as a bareknuckle kickbox fighter.