From shining a light on important issues at Cal State Bakersfield, to fostering a newsroom filled with creativity and innovation, Haydee Barahona, Communications major with an emphasis journalism, received the President’s medal from interim president, Dr. Vernon Harper on May 13.
The President’s medal is given to one outstanding undergraduate, and graduate, student at CSUB. Barahona received it as the top undergraduate student from the school of Arts and Humanities. Barahona previously received the outstanding undergraduate award from the school of Arts and Humanities as a Communications major earlier in May.
During Barahona’s undergraduate career, Jennifer Burger, former CSUB lecturer, advisor of The Runner and currently the CalMatters College Journalism network editor, helped her tremendously in figuring out what she wanted to major in.
As Barahona was still navigating her undergraduate career, she took an introduction to journalism course that Burger was teaching, catapulting her career into the major of communications.
“I think having that support from her [Burger] made me realize like wow… maybe I can do something big… her and I kept communicating, I took more of her classes and ever since then… she has been so much help towards me.” said Barahona.
Throughout Barahona’s time at CSUB, she was involved in The Runner, CSUB’s student led newspaper. Although Barahona started The Runner as a social media manager, she ended up working her way up to became the editor-in-chief of publications for The Runner, Magazine Editor of Converge, and translations editor for El Veloz, the bilingual side of The Runner.
El Veloz was a vison of Barahona, and Jennifer Sorrento, previous editor-in-chief of digital for The Runner and senior English major. With the help of Bianca Moreno, CSUB communications lecturer and Helen Louise Hawk Honors Program Council Member, they secured funding of $40,000 from the Puedes Grant for the next 4 years, to help produce content in Spanish for the El Veloz section of the newspaper and Converge magazine
Barahona also worked on an investigative fees series where she took a deep look into where funding was going across the different departments at CSUB, a series that won first place at the California Media Association conference on Mar. 9.
“I think that one of the things that I think about often is just how students are so important at the university… I think really digging deep and figuring out like why things are the way that they are on campuses and how this effects student is so important to me and it should be important to other students.”
Barahona said how a lot of the information around us isn’t known until someone brings it up. As journalist their job is to share people’s voices, something that Barahona is passionate about and wants to continue doing.
Barahona also had the opportunity to shine a light on issues beyond the CSUB campus, by being a fellow with CalMatters in their journalism fellowship program where she helped break stories regarding college financial aid, Cal State worker unions, and the CSU campus climate during the Israel-Palestine conflict.
After graduation, Barahona plans to attend UC Berkley graduate school of journalism in the fall to pursue her master’s in journalism within the narrative writing track.
Barahona hopes to pick up skills at UC Berkley in order to bring them back to the central valley, more ideally Bakersfield and Kern County, in order to continue to “enrich the reporting over here and really bring light to what is happening in underrepresented communities, what is happening in education and how that effects students… and families.” said Barahona.
