Alumni Feature – Shandra Back
Shandra Back (COM’25, CAS’ 25) graduated from BU and Kilachand Honors College in the Spring with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Political Science.
She developed ample experience doing international reporting supported by BU’s Center on Forced Displacement, the Center for Latin American Studies, KHC, and a Fellowship through the BU College of Communication and School of Public Health with the Pulitzer Center, where she covered Haitian deportation in the Dominican Republic.
And then all of a sudden, Back heard back from a job in California, one that she hadn’t thought about in a while. After going through the interview process, Back got the job, supported by the California Local News Fellowship through the University of California Berkeley.
“[Before that], I was like, ‘I have so much time. I’m rolling in time,’” Back explained. “When I got that job, everything sped up really fast: I had a year of no plans and to do this one trip, and now I’m starting a job in September. I was talking with a lot of my friends post grad [about how] everything seems to be this abyss, and then all of a sudden you get a job, or you get an opportunity, and it’s like, ‘Shoot, okay, here’s my life. I gotta move to California.’ But it was super exciting,” Back explained.
Her studies and experiences took her all over Latin America, and one experience that stuck with her was a travel grant that saw Back reporting on the border of Venezuela and Colombia for her first bout of international reporting. Here, she fell in love with the country, and soon, it pulled her back.
“I needed a little break, so I took a month in Colombia,” said Back. “I spent a month just backpacking and having fun. And then I flew straight to the Dominican Republic, and I was there for five weeks reporting on the Haitian deportation crisis.”
Back’s Pulitzer Center-supported reporting from this past summer landed her in the Guardian in which she wrote about the impact of deportation quotas on Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. It is with care that Back reports and photographs the experiences of this community, delving into the greater contexts, the climate disasters and threats of violence that influence Haitian emigration, and telling individual stories that highlight life in these informal settlements—bateys—and that put faces to crises that are often simplified to stats and headlines.
The BU grad has a clear passion and seems to have found her calling, now covering immigrant populations in Northern California.
“It’s literally my dream job. It’s so amazing,” Back remarked. “I’m working in a small, NPR affiliate newsroom with training, resources and support and all of this cool stuff from the Berkeley fellowship where a local newsroom normally wouldn’t have the funding to support young, emerging journalists.”
The California Local News Fellowship puts community reporting at its center and helps provide accurate coverage of traditionally underserved areas—an uncanny match for Back.
The importance of Back’s work is undeniable. What is also impressive is her ability to do work of this magnitude as an early-career journalist.
“When you tell someone that you’re a student, they can make assumptions on what you’re capable of doing,” she explained. “This was advice that I got from some of my journalism professors: You never have to call yourself a student journalist. Once you start studying journalism, the beauty of it is, you’re a journalist.
“So I became a journalist in high school when I was working at my little high school paper, so I’ve been a journalist for years.”
The specific niche that Back has explored deeply through her various journalistic pursuits largely came to her in a course as part of the KHC curriculum and interaction with the Center on Forced Displacement.
“The first time that I started international reporting, I was along the border of Colombia and Venezuela, and that was what kind of opened up this huge box. I came back to BU feeling like I wasn’t done. I had spent five weeks watching some of the most vulnerable people crossing by foot out of Venezuela.
“The Venezuelan displacement crisis is one of the largest displacement crises in the world right now. I was trying to figure out, ‘How can I keep working in this field?’”
She started exploring this as a part of her thesis and Keystone project, and it was something that pushed her to go beyond her perception, and the typical perception, of who is affected by these crises.
“The family that I worked with was a very comfortable middle-class family living in Venezuela when the crisis hit, so that’s how the story evolved.”
The project Back presented for her Keystone was a journalistic magazine piece focused on this family, and “the economic collapse of their middle-class roots and the global scattering that ensued.”
That piece was just published by Lacuna Magazine at the end of last month.
These experiences, beyond their clear importance to topics in international reporting, have given Back a lot to reflect on.
“What is my purpose in my career,” she asked herself, then answering, “It’s storytelling. It’s cultural connection. It’s interacting with vulnerable communities.”
She got something similar out of BU and Kilachand, too.
“I have endless gratitude for Kilichand because of the small, intimate community that it allowed me to build at BU in such a large university. Now, even though we’re far away, we plan trips together. My lock screen right now is all my Kilachand girls when we graduated. I met them the first week of freshman year, and these are my people for life,” Back said.
Through four years at BU and a wide variety of courses, experiences, and international reporting trips, Shandra Back has stayed true to her values while being committed to accurate, sensitive, and at times difficult reporting on communities and crises that aren’t often treated with such care, proving how storytelling is serious and how community connection is central.