Alumni-in-Residence: Sign Up for Office Hours with Journalist Aleszu Bajak ’06
Interested in combining a passion for writing with the issues and ideas that fuel your academic work? Curious to learn more about data and storytelling as tools for social justice? Looking to explore how your first/second/third language could help shape your pathway into journalism?
Bilingual science and data journalist Aleszu Bajak ’06 is returning to campus September 19 & 20 to present a Food for Thought luncheon and offer a limited number of office hours appointments to current students. These 20-minute appointments are available on a first-come, first-served basis and offer an informal, conversational setting to ask in-depth questions about navigating your career path post-Amherst. Particularly useful for students interested in journalism, radio/podcasts, data visualization, science communication, and media advocacy for nonprofits.
Since graduating from Amherst in 2006 with majors in Spanish and Biology, Aleszu Bajak has pursued a wide range of career experiences—from marine biology labs to launching and editing Esquire Classic, the digital archive of Esquire magazine. He is a freelance science journalist and graduate programs manager at Northeastern University's School of Journalism, where he teaches courses and runs research on digital journalism, data reporting and new media.
Aleszu is the editor of Storybench.org, an under the hood guide to digital storytelling from Northeastern's School of Journalism, and LatinAmericanScience.org, a resource for science news and opinion out of Latin America. He was a founding senior writer at Undark, a magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. Aleszu has also been a freelance reporter in Latin America, a producer for the public radio show Science Friday, and once upon a time worked in the gene therapy department at Weill Cornell. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Boston Globe magazine, MIT Technology Review, the Huffington Post, bioGraphic, Esquire, Nature, Science, New Scientist, Beeradvocate, and Guernica, among other outlets. He grew up in New Jersey, Germany and Colombia and has lived in Chile, Peru and Argentina.
To book appointments instantly, students must submit a Loeb Center-approved resume. (Learn about this approval process here.) To book without an approved resume, please upload / submit your pending document, then e-mail careers@amherst.edu with your availability.