I recently started writing music reviews for the Mountain Weekly News, a small online publication. I’m a music nerd–really, I own a lot of tunes–and it’s a nice break from legal issues. My first review was for Seattle indie-rock band Ivan & Alyosha. Check it out here.

Barely any of us Central High School freshmen even knew someone who knew someone in New York or Washington on 9/11. But all of us knew Shanksville, the site of United Airlines Flight 93, the plane that crashed into a field after passengers revolted against their attackers.

I was on my way from my last morning class to Mr. Waite’s room for first lunch study period. Walking down the hall that morning, I noticed everyone in each classroom was glued to a TV. Several cars were lined up outside the school’s main entrance. I later learned the cars contained concerned parents waiting to take their kids out of school.

Most of the kids in Mr. Waite’s classroom that morning were carrying on as usual until he hit his hand on his desk a few times, told everyone to stop what they were doing and to watch what was going on.

“This is why we say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning,” he said. He had a slight choke in his voice, darting his finger to the TV. I still think of that every time I hear the Pledge.

I headed to gym class after lunch, where our teachers planned for us to go outside to run around the track that afternoon. My friend Stacy and I refused to change into our uniforms because we heard about the plane that crashed in a field an hour away from our school. We thought more planes were on the way, and that our teachers were crazy.

“You want us to run around in a big black circle in the middle of a field dressed in red gym uniforms?” we sneered. “Forget it!” They still took away grade points, but spared us detention.

United Airlines Flight 93, which curiously landed in a region of several historic rebellions, is the only plane out of the three where passengers successfully revolted against their attackers. The flight was allegedly headed to the Capitol, until passenger Todd Beamer made the infamous phone call to a telephone operator about the attack. It’s strange to think that while I was just learning about the attacks, Beamer was reciting the Lord’s Prayer with the operator and possibly saving Washington after yelling, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!” I heard his hometown named its high school after him.

Other events from that day: Patrick asked me to be his girlfriend on the bus home, my childhood friend Sarah was having one surreal 19th birthday and my parents and I had a very, very quiet dinner.

It’s been 10 years and I’ve since moved to Colorado, where no one knows where Shanksville is. I still tell the story about how Stacy and I skipped gym class because we didn’t want to be targets, and how I once went to the top of the WTC with my family and looked across the big city that inspired me to write.

But perhaps the most compelling memory from 9/11 that still resonates with me today didn’t happen on 9/11. It was about a week or two after, when my family and I attended a vigil in Hollidaysburg for the victims. It’s the echo of my dad, who was red in the face and among the loudest in the crowd yelling, “USA! USA! USA!”

Ali McNally

(Former Roaring Spring resident)

Denver, Colo.

I’m a first-generation college graduate in my immediate family, and less than half of my extended family have a college degree. That surprises a lot of people when I tell them, and I’m finding that almost none of my peers journalism have a similar background.

This is just a hunch, but I think the lack of socioeconomic representation comes from the culture of unpaid internships among media outlets. There’s a new investigative book on unpaid internships from a guy named Ross Perlin called “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.” In it, Perlin attacks the “glamour industries” for the misuse of unpaid help—film, fashion, entertainment, politics and the media—and the cost of breaking into those industries.

This isn’t an attack on my wealthier peers. They have as much of a right to be at a news desk as much as anyone. But if media companies didn’t have an unpaid internship culture, would our newsrooms be more diverse? I would give you numbers to prove my hunch, but I’m having trouble finding them (if you come across any, e-mail me at mcnally.ali@gmail.com) The latest annual newsroom census from the American Society of News Editors detailed minority numbers in newsrooms, but its doesn’t show reporters’ socioeconomic status.

When I was in college (a whopping two years ago), if you didn’t intern, you didn’t get “in.” In fact, I couldn’t get my English degree without at least one school-supervised internship. According to a Yahoo! News interview with Perlin:

“This isn’t just about rough stories….This is a broader issue about work in America,” Perlin said. “There’s the question about what happens to the non-interns. The people who can’t pay to play. People who can’t…break into the world of white collar work, which is where increasingly high level influential, highly paid jobs are in our economy. If to get into that sort of layer of the white collar world, you have to work for several months unpaid, you have to live often in cities like Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, they’re expensive to live in.”

I don’t want the daunting internship experience to intimidate first-generation college kids who are thinking of going into journalism. We need you in our newsrooms, and so do our readers. I’m going to dedicate a few posts to the scrappy students out there looking to get into the media on their own dollar, who will probably have to take a part-time job to support their internships. Are there any of you left? If so, drop me a line, tell me about yourself and ask me a question. I can’t tell you everything about journalism (I’m new here myself), but I can tell you how I got here so you can get to where you’re going too.

Law Week Colorado received 14 awards from the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Top of the Rockies” contest. A reception was given April 15, which was attended by reporters, editors, copy editors and photographers from around the state.

The contest accepted entries from papers of all circulation sizes in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. A link to the full story can be found here. We swept the legal categories in our circulation class, and my colleague Matt Masich received a first-place award in the arts-and-entertainment category for his story on the mural in the old state Supreme Court building. Our photographer Jamie Cotten also won awards for feature photography in “Home of the Brave” and for a multimedia tour of the new Denver Justice Center.

My winning entries were:

• First Place, legal feature reporting, “Home of the Brave.”
• Second Place, legal general reporting, “A Question of IQ.“
• Third Place, legal general reporting, “No Body, No Murder.“
• Third Place, legal enterprise/investigative reporting, “Cortez Controversy.“

Congrats to my colleagues, and to our editor Don Knox! We have a heck of a team.

Let me explain.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my Korean heritage. Like most Asian Americans of my generation, I don’t identify with the widely-perceived Asian female stereotype. I’m loud, I’m cynical and I have a career in the liberal arts. I was told at a very early age that I wasn’t white and I understood that, just not the whole Asian thing.

“Does this mean I know Karate?” my five-year-old self asked my babysitter, who was kicking herself for telling me I was adopted before my parents could.

“Uh, no,” she said. “But it’s the reason why you have such pretty black hair.”

There weren’t many Asians in the public eye or anywhere in my small rural hometown, aside from Kung Fu stars, Connie Chung and that lovely Chinese couple who owned Wong’s Wok at the Logan Valley Mall food court. There weren’t any toys for Asians either. But Barbie had her black friend and American Girl had Addy. So I went with them. They had black hair and darker skin just like me, in the summer months anyway.

There weren’t any Asians in pop culture either. My first cassette tapes were Janet Jackson’s “janet.”, TLC’s “Crazy Sexy Cool” and Boyz II Men’s “II.” My favorite shows on Nickelodeon were “All That,” “My Brother and Me” and “Salute Your Shorts,” all of which had mixed-race casts of all skin colors but yellow. No sports stars, no movie stars and certainly no Asian female role models existed for kids until Disney’s Mulan, a cartoon.

My parents, who couldn’t find Asian dolls but didn’t want me to think black people were bad, went along with it. They didn’t know any Asian families and I was one of four Asian kids in my whole school.

“It wasn’t a big deal and you were happy, so whatever,” Mom said, “The only time I drew the line was when you asked me if you could change your name to Jamika (from Bebe’s Kids).”

My black phase carried on for a few years, from about kindergarten until fourth grade. I realized I was Asian when kids used to stretch out their eyes and call me “Mrs. Chan.” One kid used to prank call my house every week asking to place an order for “flied lice.” I may not share the same heritage as my black friends, but I have some idea of what it’s like to feel inferior.

I heavily resented my Asian heritage until a trip to Honolulu in junior high showed me for the first time what it was like to be a part of a majority, and how meaningless it was. I loved Korean food when I tried it for the first time in college and my two favorite football players, Troy Polamalu and Hines Ward, each have AAPI roots. President Barack Obama eventually proclaimed May as “Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.”

So happy Airplane Day and happy Black History Month. I’ll be celebrating over kim chi and sweet tea.

The semester has since ended, but two of our students and I have teamed up for some impromptu language classes each week. I teach them English for an hour in exchange for an hour of Spanish. They’re good people and I’ve learned a lot in just the few weeks we’ve known each other.

One of my students, “Lucinda,” is hellbent on learning English just so she can piss off her boss.

“He don’t like me and I don’t like him,” she said. “If I learn English, I will do better than him and take his job and make more money.”

She’s also dead serious. Her den is lined with “Inglés” books, videos and CDs. Her husband and son are practically fluent, but “I don’t like when they teach me,” she said with a flick of a hand in the direction of their smirks.

“Thalia,” who is about the same age as me, is an architect (Most of our students at the Learning Source are professionals in their countries, but work menial jobs in the U.S. because they don’t know English.) She quit her job and came to the States to learn English so she could be more successful.

Teaching English isn’t hard. Just a little bit of conversation to kick things off and answering a lot of questions about speech. We usually just sit in Lucinda’s den, bitch about our work week over fresh horchata and correct each other on our grammar (“‘My boss is a jerk,’ not ‘My boss is jerk.’”) It’s been working out really well.