UMass Alumni All-Star Career Night and Ice Cream Social
Prominent alumni from the fields of public relations and journalism will speak at career night.
Five alumni, including Boston Herald sports writer Steve Buckley and National Public Radio correspondent Audie Cornish, will speak at a panel discussion, The Alumni All-Star Career Night and Ice Cream Social. The event is part of the Journalism Program Lecture Series on Broadcast and the Media.
The panel will feature UMass alumni who will speak about their careers and the current state of journalism and public relations. The evening will kick off with a free ice cream buffet at 5 p.m., and end with a door prize raffle.
Speakers include: Buckley, a 1978 grad, who is a book author, talk show personality, and sports columnist for the Boston Herald; Sandy Lish ’87, co-founder and principal of The Castle Group, a prominent Boston public relations firm; Cornish, a 2001 graduate, who covers the South for National Public Radio; Aaron Saykin ’01, a consumer reporter for the Pittsburgh Channel; and Maria Sacchetti ’91, a reporter for The Boston Globe.
Lish was recently awarded the CWE “Emerging Business Star” award in recognition of her professional and civic contributions. She has been named a Top 10 PR Specialist by Women’s Business, and one of The Boston Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” business leaders. Under Lish's leadership, The Castle Group has won numerous industry and business awards, for both client work and business acumen. Lish shares her expertise with various media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, USA Today, BusinessWeek and the Boston Business Journal. She is a frequent public speaker, presenting to professional, academic and non-profit audiences.
Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Cornish covers a ten-state territory in the South, including many states left reeling by the 2005 hurricane season. Cornish provides reports for NPR's award-winning Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, as well as NPR's newscasts. She joined NPR in October 2005. Cornish covered the aftermath of several disasters including, Hurricane Katrina, and the tornadoes in Tennessee in 2006 and Alabama in 2007.
In 2005, Cornish shared in a first prize in the National Awards for Education Writing for "Reading, Writing, and Race," a study of the achievement gap. She is a National member of the Association of Black Journalists.
Call 4 Action reporter Aaron Saykin joined the WTAE Channel 4 Action News team in July 2006. Before that, he worked as an investigative and general assignment reporter at WGRZ in Buffalo, N.Y. He also has worked as a general assignment reporter at WECT in Wilmington, N.C., and as a producer and fill-in reporter at WGGB in Springfield. Also, he previously wrote for several newspapers in the same area.
In Buffalo, Saykin shared multiple AP and Best of Gannett Awards for his reporting. While working in North Carolina, he won the 2002 AP award for feature reporting and five awards from the Electronic News Association of the Carolinas for political, investigative and feature reporting. Most recently Saykin received a 2006 Emmy Award this his profile of "J-Mac,” the Rochester, New York, high-school student with autism who was allowed to play in a varsity basketball game and scored 20 points in four minutes.
Sacchetti is an education reporter at The Boston Globe, where she has worked since October 2004. She has also reported in Orange County, Calif., Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Colombia, covering police, courts, politics and hurricanes. As an undergrad, she worked at the Daily Collegian, and later earned a master's in Latin American studies/economics from the University of Texas, Austin.
The Journalism Program Lecture Series is funded by David ‘79 and Teena Kantor. The Journalism Program faculty and students look forward to seeing everyone at their final event of the year!