Career Paths

From the time he was 12 years old, Donald Suxho knew he was not only going to play volleyball, but he was going to be one of the greatest players in the world — a big dream for a young man growing up in communist Albania in the 1980s and ’90s. Suxho recalls standing in line for bread and cheese in his poverty-stricken hometown of Korçë as a child. “If you didn’t get your food by 7 a.m., you...

From performance to business and scholarship, the love of music shapes lives and livelihoods.

When Jeremy Hecht was 17, he wrote a song hoping to save another teen’s life. Hecht had already been dabbling in posting his own music videos on YouTube and built a decent following. So, when a classmate shared a video link of a youth who was planning to take his own life, Hecht knew he had...

When then-USC senior Natalie Fung went on a trip with her friends to Las Vegas in Fall of 2013 to commemorate their last year of college, she had the next few months of her life all planned out. Slated to graduate early with a public relations degree, she had lined up a paid PR internship at Nickelodeon....

Zac Coughlin always had a sweet tooth. Whether it was cake-batter truffles, salted caramel pretzels, or rainbow-sprinkled cookie pizzas, from the time he was 8 years old, Coughlin was constantly baking up mouth-watering confections. Simply, he said, “because it made other people happy.”

“Growing up, I loved watching Cupcake Wars and all the baking shows… but I never saw anyone that...

“I try to learn something new every day,” said alumna Hannah Hunter. “I like to think of things in the big picture — as big a picture as possible.”

Now a public relations associate with KARV Communications, a small PR firm in New York City, Hunter has been broadening her horizons from an early age. The Michigan native grew up outside Flint, and fondly recalls the trips she took in her...

Even though USC Annenberg alumna Hannah Traussnigg lives and works only a two-and-a-half-hour drive away from her hometown in Austria, she’s on the international adventure of a lifetime.

Serving as a public information intern at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Vienna, she works to dismantle negative stereotypes associated with refugees and migrants through social...

Long before she started college, Marie Chantal Marauta had already developed a global perspective. Born in her father’s native Italy, she moved often as her father’s work took them across the world. Marauta attended primary school in the United Arab Emirates and spent the majority of her high school in the Philippines, her mother’s home country.

During high school, Marauta had the...

Gabrielle Chenault got into journalism because she wanted to tell impactful stories about underrepresented communities. She got her first chance to do just that on a big stage a bit earlier than she expected.

After graduating from Hampton University in Virginia, the Queens, New York native spent this past summer as a Facebook Historically Black College or University (HBCU) News fellow...