Caitlin Dickerson \u201811 did not arrive at Cal State Long Beach intending to be a journalist \u2014 much less a Pulitzer Prize-winning one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
She loved to read and was relentlessly curious, but her high school in Merced had been so large she often felt invisible. \u201cI just kind of needed somebody to take an interest in me and notice the potential that I had,\u201d she said. When that didn\u2019t happen, \u201cI floundered.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fifteen years later, Dickerson is one of the country\u2019s most respected investigative journalists whose groundbreaking reports on U.S. immigration policy, including family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, have helped define the national record.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The shift came through sustained exposure \u2014 to rigorous ideas, to faculty who paid attention and to an academic culture that valued exploration over ambition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember feeling like college was a four-year long riddle that I had to solve to figure out what I was meant to do with my life,\u201d Dickerson said. \u201cWhat happened when I got to college was that I was just so deeply interested in what I was studying.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
I have a lot of pride about being a Cal State Long Beach grad. It feels good to work alongside colleagues from Harvard and Yale and realize I\u2019m totally able to keep up with them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That interest deepened in her chosen major, International Studies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the best things about [CSULB\u2019s] International Studies curriculum was that it was really critical for us to read the news,\u201d she said. \u201cMy professors always pushed us to connect whatever concepts that we were learning about, even if it was history from hundreds of years ago, to what was happening in the present day.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
A professor who paid attention\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of those professors was Richard Marcus<\/a>, who still teaches in the Global Studies Department<\/a>. He recalls Dickerson fondly, having exchanged more than 200 emails with her as a student \u2014 mostly because precision was one of her hallmarks.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCaitlin was exacting as a student,\u201d Marcus said. \u201cShe knew her faculty well, and they already knew how special she was.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For a time, Dickerson set her sights on law school. But while reading all those new stories in Marcus’ classes, she began paying increasing attention to the news itself and how it was made.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI found myself asking, you know, how did this journalist get this person to agree to an interview . . . or how did this journalist get all of this data? How did they analyze it, and then how did they put the story together?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I tend to work on stories that nobody else is working on . . . that nobody else thinks is important in the moment.<\/p>\n Those questions became a turning point.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJournalism was sparking my interest in things that I . . . never thought I would be curious about, and that felt really powerful to me,\u201d she said. \u201cCould I get people interested in things that I know are really important but that aren\u2019t widely understood?That\u2019s kind of become my entire career.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Learning the craft\u00a0<\/p>\n After graduation, Dickerson applied for \u201ca ton\u201d of internships, eventually landing on NPR\u2019s Washington desk, where much of her time was spent transcribing interviews. While \u201cincredibly tedious,\u201d she said, it was also transformative.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was listening to the techniques of the most decorated and well-established journalists at NPR,\u201d she said. \u201cI got to spend months just listening to them and really studying.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n From there, she moved through some of the nation\u2019s most competitive newsrooms \u2014 The New York Times, CNN and ultimately The Atlantic \u2014 building a reputation for investigations take years and involve hundreds of interviews.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI tend to work on stories that nobody else is working on . . . that nobody else thinks is important in the moment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2023, following her reporting on U.S. government\u2019s family-separation policy, that approach earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting . Earlier, she and her NPR colleagues received a George Foster Peabody Award for uncovering race-based secret mustard gas testing on American troops during World War II. More recently, she traveled to the Dari\u00e9n Gap to report on the perilous journey migrants undertake through Panama.\u00a0<\/p>\n The awards helped quiet occasional self-doubt.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBoth felt like the universe almost telling me to keep going, and that I was on the right track,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n No shortcuts \u2014 just the work\u00a0<\/p>\n What stands out to now, looking back, is how improbable her path once seemed. Dickerson entered elite national newsrooms without inherited networks or Ivy League shortcuts.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI showed up in the industry with not one contact \u2014 not one single connection \u2014 to give me a leg up,\u201d she said. \u201cI have a lot of pride about being a Cal State Long Beach grad. It feels good to work alongside colleagues from Harvard and Yale and realize I\u2019m totally able to keep up with them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n These days Dickerson is living in Brooklyn with her husband and working on her first book. Above all, she urges students to enjoy the process and trust their instincts.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPursue work that, even at its most daunting, doesn\u2019t feel all that much like work.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Caitlin Dickerson \u201811 did not arrive at Cal State Long Beach intending to be a journalist \u2014 much…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[1818,1820,7,1815,1823,1821,1822,1819,131,133,132,1817,1816],"class_list":["post-228652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-49ers","tag-cal-state","tag-california","tag-college","tag-conoley","tag-csu","tag-csulb","tag-dirtbags","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-long-beach-state","tag-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}