I’m still deciding what I want to be when I grow up. Writing is a great career for that.

In 2006, I left school with a bachelor’s degree in astronomy, but it was four years on the school paper that landed me my first job: writing obituaries and movie schedules as a news clerk for the New Jersey Herald in Newton, New Jersey. It wasn’t long before I was bumped up to a full-fledged reporter, covering the state fair, municipal meetings, black bear sightings, and whatever else came up each day. With experience came bigger stories, usually around politics — traveling to Trenton to see our local state representatives sworn in, and profiling 40-year state legislator Robert Littell are two that come to mind. I also put my degree to use, landing a career-highlight interview with local-turned-NASA-astrophysicist John Mather about his Nobel Prize-winning work on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. (Later, Mather was senior project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope.)

In 2008, I took a job at The Express-Times and lehighvalleylive.com in Easton, Pennsylvania, where I spent the next 15 years. I moved from a beat in the New Jersey coverage area to the copy desk, advancing from copy editor to news editor. I was running the desk the night that 15-seed Lehigh University defeated No. 2 Duke in the NCAAM tournament — forcing a thrilling redesign of the front page on deadline. (The page itself appeared in SportsCenter’s coverage of the upset.)

I was relocated to a “pub hub” in Edison, New Jersey, when parent company Advance consolidated some of its operations, which provided some experience editing for other publications including The (Newark) Star-Ledger. But I soon returned to Easton as a reporter again, where the digital-first focus allowed for new creative story opportunities. As traditional beats gave way to more enterprising storytelling, I settled into an “explainer” role, taking second looks at breaking news and events for context. This included general mayhem like a school-shooter hoax that affected students and law enforcement in several states, or coverage roundups of presidential visits. But I most enjoyed explaining science and local history — describing eclipses, storms, snow rollers (yes, that’s a real thing), and delving into microfilm for a weekly local history feature of my own design.

The highlights of my time and The Express-Times and lehighvalleylive.com have to be 1) Meeting my wife, 2) Putting the COVID-19 pandemic into local context with data and human stories, and 3) Winning Syracuse University’s 2021 Toner Prize as co-lead reporter for “Swing County, Swing State,” a package covering the 2020 presidential election through a local lens.

I left full-time news media in 2024, pursuing new challenges in technical writing and freelance opportunities. As a technical proposal writer for a government contractor, I contribute both content and editing to multimillion-dollar proposals in the federal health care and national security sectors. My freelance opportunities have involved writing blog posts for a local fentanyl-awareness campaign and editing statewide workforce and child-care reports for an Alaskan research firm. I was even asked to send off my old paper: Whenever anyone looks up the last print edition of The Express-Times (Feb. 2, 2025), they’ll see my byline on the historical eulogy.

From science to sports, politics to people, I’m excited to see where writing will take me next.