The View from the Office
I met up with Maya True Wasik for breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien at Columbus Circle. She had tea and an egg, cheddar and avocado sandwich. I had the yogurt parfait.
Maya is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an aspiring documentary filmmaker. We were introduced by a mutual friend, Ryan Cheah.
Maya is finishing her degree remotely from New York so she can work as an intern at NBC. She spent the past summer assisting the network’s documentary team. At the end of the summer, her internship was extended into the academic year.
The incredible part of the internship is getting to work with people who have decades of experience, at NBC and other outlets such as Vox and Vice Media.
On the side, she shoots photos and videos for restaurants, startups and events to generate revenue that keeps her afloat. At events, people often ask how she got the gig. “It’s actually the camera that keeps getting me connected,” she tells them.
She’s worked on documentaries covering the environment, arts and culture. She produced a short film, Buckets and Boots, about local recovery efforts in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene. The film placed fifth in the Hearst Journalism Awards Program’s Multimedia III Enterprise Story competition.
Maya grew up in North Carolina. Her mother is a professor at Elon University who wanted her children to be citizens of the world, so she sent Maya to a school where half the day was taught in Spanish, and later a year of high school in Costa Rica, and then United World College in New Mexico. Maya also lived in Hong Kong for a stretch.
We talked about how much journalism has changed and how different it is to try to land a job as a journalist. When I started at Bloomberg, people typically looked for an entry-level job at a news organization, where someone more experienced would teach them the ropes.
Maya, by contrast, started making content, and job offers have followed.
You can connect with Maya via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm introduction.
