NBC producer, Penn alumna speaks on career

Amna Nawaz was on the scene during both the Haiti earthquake and the flood in Pakistan last year. She once spent an entire day reporting outside Rahm Emanuel’s door in the West Wing of the White House. However, not having any prior journalism experience didn’t deter this 2001 College graduate and Emmy winner.

Nawaz, currently an NBC news producer and video journalist, recounted her experiences in the field Monday evening before a small audience in Houston Hall’s Benjamin Franklin Room.

“We try to showcase alumni who are doing things that anybody related to Penn would be interested in,” said 1995 Wharton graduate Nicole Maloy, director of multicultural outreach at Penn Alumni Relations and organizer of the event. “It’s also to expose people to what diverse alumni end up doing around the country or around the world.”

After graduating from Penn with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Nawaz earned a year-long fellowship at ABC News designed “for people with zero journalism experience. It was a lot of luck and a total fluke,” she said.

One month into the fellowship, she and her peers had a “career-defining moment”: September 11, 2001. She produced stories on her own that year, but decided to leave for the London School of Economics at the fellowship’s end because she “loved journalism too much — for me to find something so quickly that just clicked gave me pause.”

But her love for journalism didn’t diminish in London, so Nawaz took another fellowship, this time at NBC. She has been in the field ever since.

“For me, it was the storytelling that I really liked,” Nawaz said, before reiterating her the motto of her long-time mentor at ABC: “70 percent of the job is showing up.”

However, she has done more than just show up — she has told long-form stories on everything from the unlikely Italian influence on Pakistani olive farmers to the plight of Shelley Anderson, whose husband died on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig last April.

Anderson’s story resonated deeply with Nawaz, who added, “the thing I love most about stories are the people I meet along the way.”

Aspiring journalists enjoyed Nawaz’s talk. “I was really interested in hearing from someone who went to Penn and who’s also a woman,” College freshman Sarah Shihadah, a former contributing writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian, said. “Her insights were really valuable and inspiring.”

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