The Business and Economic Reporting program enrolls an average of twelve students each year. They range in background from students fresh out of undergraduate school to experienced investment bankers who have come to NYU after years of global investment experience. MBAs, lawyers, Fulbright Scholars, and professional journalists are among our new students, who come from countries around the globe. All have been high achievers in the past and are intent on covering a wide range of stories that have a business or economic angle.
BER is truly an international program. In eight years, we have had students from 20 countries other than the U.S.: China (8 students), India (8 students), Singapore (4 students), Brazil (3 students), South Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Hungary, Nepal, Canada, Great Britain, Denmark, Italy, Australia, Russia, Denmark, Nicaragua, and France.
Our students have won numerous awards since the program began in 1999. We've had multiple winners of the Overseas Press Club Award, the Foreign Press Association Award, and the New York Financial Writers Association Scholarship (NYFWA) Awards, among others. In 2006, four of our students won the NYFWA Scholarships, out of ten awarded. In 2007, three of our students won the NYFWA Scholarship and one the Overseas Press Club Award.
Our ninth group of students arrived in September 2007. Profiles of the BER-9 students follow:
Steven Bertoni graduated from Colgate University in 2002 with a B.A. in international relations. Before joining BER, he worked for Merrill Lynch as a clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. During this time, his passion for journalism continued to develop. He enrolled in NYU's BER program because business and economic reporting would not only build on his Wall Street experience, but also act as a strong bridge between his old career and journalism.
Uma Dixit received a Bachelors' degree from a university in Vadodara, India. She came to the United States 22 years ago to attend graduate school and obtained an M.S. and a PhD in Environmental Economics from the University of Rhode Island. After graduating, she consulted to the World Bank. Soon after, she rediscovered her interest in writing. She freelanced feature stories for Chicago dailies and interned for Chicago Public Radio. Then, she spent two years in Paris as an editorial consultant to the OECD.
Gina Faridniya came directly to NYU from the University of California at Davis. She double majored in communication and English with an emphasis in creating writing and completed her creative honors thesis in poetry. While in school, Gina worked as publications associate for the California Association for Local Economic Development. She was also entertainment producer and reporter for the campus television program, AGTV. In the summer of 2006, Gina covered state politics for the Ventura County Star newspaper and Gannett News Service in Sacramento. She is particularly interested in writing about the music business.
Ana Patricia Ferrey graduated with a B.A. in economics and a minor in government from Smith College. During her undergraduate career she discovered the joys and frustrations of academic research and agricultural economics. Two things she is passionate about are Nicaragua, where she was born and raised, and her family. She explored pursuing a doctorate in economics but realized that she would rather write a feature story than an econometrics study. So, she applied and came to the BER program.
Daniel M. Harrison completed his MBA at BI, Norwegian School of Management in Norway in September 2006. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, and is a regular contributor to TheStreet.com and RealMoney.com. Prior to getting his MBA, Daniel worked in corporate finance in London, restructuring companies and taking them public on the AIM and OFEX exchanges. He was formerly head of private client services for St. Helen's Capital, London's largest OFEX corporate finance house.
Joyce Koh graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in economics and history. She began her journalism career in Singapore at a business daily, where she spent her time writing about local companies and financial markets, and later hounding CEOs when corruption scandals broke. She then switched to the "dark side" by joining the corporate communications team of a bank. But the lure of journalism proved too hard to resist, and so she's now in BER, trying to marry her two passions of business and writing.
Kelly Nolan graduated with journalism and religion majors from Northwestern University. There she worked with three other students on a believed wrongful murder conviction case for the Medill Innocence Project. After college, she moved to New York, where she covered apparel and toy companies for a biweekly retail trade magazine, Retailing Today. During her two years there, she landed exclusive interviews with several retail chief executive officers, regularly attended New York Fashion Week and wrote about industry sales and trends. Her desire to get a stronger background in economics and accounting led her to the BER program.
Tatyana Shumsky has a B.A. (Hons.) in English and a Graduate Diploma in commerce from the University of New South Wales, Australia, where served as an assistant editor of the campus newspaper. She was attracted to NYU's BER program because it enables her to explore her interests in writing and finance through a combination of graduate journalism and Stern MBA courses. Tatyana is fluent in Russian, and she also enjoys photography.
Sui-Lee Wee graduated with a Bachelor's in communication studies, with a major in journalism, from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. After graduation, Sui-Lee worked for Reuters in Singapore, where she covered the Southeast Asian stock markets. She joined the program through the Wall Street Journal Journalism in Asia Fellowship because she wanted to learn how to report financial news authoritatively. Sui-Lee believes that there are corporate scandals waiting to be told- and she wants to be the one telling the story.
Jay Yarow received a B.A. in economics at the University of Delaware. After graduating, he began freelancing for a national music magazine, Rockpile. He also worked as an assistant supervisor for Wharton Reprographics at the Wharton School of Business. In the summer of 2006 he assisted a small NGO in Tanzania and Ethiopia. Upon his return, he decided he was interested in reporting about substantive issues, so he applied to BER. He thought that the BER program offered a unique approach to journalism school, one that seemed both pragmatic and beneficial.
Sun Yu joined the Financial Times Shanghai bureau in 2004 and moved to its Beijing bureau in 2005. As a reporter there, he focused on the impact of China's market liberalization on its political and business environment. Before that, he interned at a number of domestic and international news outlets including The New York Times Shanghai bureau, the Shanghai Morning Post, the Shanghai Evening Post and the Shanghai Xinmin Evening News where he covered metro and national news. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Fudan University in Shanghai, and enrolled in the BER program through the Wall Street Journal Journalism in Asia Fellowship. He hopes to apply the skills acquired from BER to translating business issues into accurate and intriguing stories.
