52 ForOregonState.org/Stater OUR COMMUNITY LIZ LINDER Meghna Chakrabarti ’98 RADIO JOURNALIST AND EDITOR, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO At 10 a.m. every weekday, Meghna Chakrabarti’s voice beams out from her studio at the WBUR offices in Boston, Massachusetts; across the airwaves of more than 350 radio stations; and out of the speakers of more than two million listeners all over the country. Chakrabarti, ’98, is the host of On Point, a national public radio show in which she interviews experts in an attempt to shed light on some of the biggest issues facing our society, from climate change to racial justice to income inequality. “I pinch myself every day ’cause I get to do this,” she says. “I come out of most shows at the end of the hour thinking, ‘Oh my God, I did not know X about that.’ So it is a thrill.” AS TOLD TO > KATHERINE CUSUMANO When you entered OSU in 1995, you studied civil and environmental engineering. How would you describe your experience? I loved it. I sort of restarted my university career at OSU. My first year and a half of college, I was at Stanford; then I took some time off for mental health reasons. Stanford’s great, but students come largely from one socioeconomic tier. At OSU, I exper- ienced a really different kind of diversity: as a university that is dedicated to serving students in Oregon from all walks of life, there’s far more economic diversity. Experiencing all the different kinds of truths that people bring with them into their stu- dent careers at OSU was very shap- ing for me. How did you end up in journalism? I was here in the Boston area to do a master’s degree in environmental science and risk management. My dad, who was a lifelong, passionate scientist, would always tell me, “If you want to be a great scientist, you have to love the experiments you’re working on so much that questions about it keep you up at night.” When I came to the end of that degree, I had this revelation that engineering wasn’t keeping me up at night. I’d al- ways had public radio on, so one day I wrote a letter to one of the jour- nalists at WBUR. A week later, she sent me a message. She’s still in my life today — a huge mentor. How did mentorship shape the direction that your career took? Mentors have been hugely important in my life. It’s not just practical, career-based mentorship that matters. It matters in the workplace to have someone older and more experienced. Mentorship isn’t just a one-way thing, though. I think one of the reas- ons why my mentors have been willing to help me is because they saw that I ran with it and worked hard. Your dad, also an alumnus, made a similar shift from one career path, as a researcher in microbiology, to another, in computer
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==