MY STORIES: 

• Is this the place for me?: Latinx students at a predominantly white institution 
• MEChA High School Conference at the University of Utah
• Latinx businesses in the Salt Lake City area

MY BLOG: 

The biggest challenge for me was time. My car broke down at the beginning of this school year so I wasn’t able to drive anywhere, but I didn’t realize how far everything in this valley truly was. I tried to keep my stories on campus as much as possible, but it was hard as the semester progressed because students got busy with midterms and such so they didn’t have time to sit and chat with me anymore.  

Other than that major inconvenience, I enjoyed working with the beat. I am pretty active in the Latinx community so it wasn’t hard for me to find things to write about, just hard for me to get to them. I love that I was able to use the resources that I already had and put them to use.

I never felt like an “outsider” because this is a community I interact with on a daily basis. The biggest thing for me was staying unbiased and to interview new people. To be honest, I was kind of jealous of the people who aren’t part of the community as it would be easier for them to not have a conflict of interest and to meet new people. I was often racing to find people I didn’t know.

It was often hard for me to figure out what was a story because I am so engrossed in the community that everything that happens just feels like every day. It was nice, however, to be in a more comfortable space. As a woman of color, it’s hard sometimes to go into super white spaces and have them take me seriously.   

Working in this beat solidified my career goals for me. I have always loved working with communities of color and have become even more sure that it is what I want to do. I hope to use my legal degree to help people like the ones I interviewed live the lives they are entitled to.

ABOUT ME: 

Iasia Beh is a current law student at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

A Murray, Utah, native, she graduated from the University of Utah with a BS in Communication in 2019.

Beh credits her skills in writing to not having television as a child and her interest in journalism to her father, who forced her to listen to NPR on car rides.

Beh hopes to become a public defender in the future and to one day meet Michelle Obama. She can be found on Twitter (@IasiaBeh) and on Instagram (@iasiabeh).

Filed under: Hispanics & Latinos(as), Student-Journalists |