Alumni Spotlight - Areeba Shah
Areeba is using her Communication Degree to make the world a better place. She is
currently a staff writer at Salon covering news and politics. As a reporter committed to examining issues through an
equity lens, her work often highlights issues impacting historically marginalized
communities. Previously, she was a researcher at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics
in Washington, where she worked on projects exposing government corruption and dark
money spending in politics.
Areeba has also reported on how COVID-19 has impacted migrant farmworkers in the Midwest as a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center. Her work has included covering the coronavirus outbreak in nursing homes, working on a long-term project about immigration court in Chicago and reporting on the Democratic primaries in South Carolina. Areeba is also a graduate of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism where she pursued a MSJ with a focus in Social Justice and Investigative Reporting. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Reader, The Blade and Pakistan’s Friday Times.
Areeba believes her communication degree played an important part in her success. “The communication degree exposes you to a lot of different things. I took classes in video editing, TV production, investigative journalism and audio editing, and public speaking. These classes prepared me to think on my feet. I was pushed out of my comfort zone. When I graduated college I was ready to take on anything.”
She is especially confident that a communication degree is essential to today’s marketplace because you never know what is going to be the next skill set you rely on. It is great to be a well-rounded individual because you never know what your next gig is going to be.
