Student Spotlight: Matela on UN Global Engagement Summit
Josee Matela (Pardee’20, COM’20) was recently profiled by the Arts and Science Magazine, a publication of the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences.
Matela was profiled in an article entitled “Her Voice, Her Vocation: Attending the UN Global Engagement Summit Inspired a Student Journalist.”
From the text of the article:
On February 23, 2018, Josee Matela entered the United Nations Headquarters in New York City clutching an official identification badge. “Walking into the General Assembly Hall was surreal,” she says. “Throughout your life, you hear about these wondrous places that seem far away. Then you arrive and it feels like a dream.” She was there with the Boston University International Affairs Association(BUIAA) for the 2018 United Nations Global Engagement Summit. The daylong event drew together more than 1,800 world leaders and grassroots activists, and students from more than 120 colleges and universities.
An international relations and journalism major, Matela (CAS’20, COM’20) attended panels and lectures by speakers like Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina J. Mohammed, and economist Jeffrey Sachs, who addressed topics including climate change and the refugee crisis. These are the type of pressing global issues on which Matela intends to make her mark as a journalist.
Matela has been passionate about writing since childhood—“When I was four, I loved stories so much that I would sleep with my storybooks under my pillows,” she says on her website—but studying at BU has brought a new focus to her storytelling.
You can read the full article here.
Matela also recently took over the Pardee School Instagram account where she highlighted recent Pardee School events she had attended, her Pardee School classes, and the work she does at BU TV 10.