By Adam Asher
If you were to call Katie Bennett at one of her busier moments in the day, you might get an answering machine message urging you to email her for an appointment.
“I get really annoyed when sources call back and don’t leave a message,” she says.
The answering machine is for people who she is looking to interview or has done so in the past.
At the age of 20, many students are still clueless about a possible career path. Katie, on the other hand, has it all planned out. She’s wants to be a medical journalist.
“Most magazines have a doctor and a writer,” she says, “I would be that in one person.”
For Katie, career inspiration came in the form of a rewarding summer internship. She spent the summer working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia making children’s experiences there as comfortable as possible.
“It was really neat to see how kids worked out their problems through play,” Katie says. The experience convinced her to add biology as a course of studies on top of journalism.
Katie grew up in Bucks County, Pa., with her quiet family and prefers the equally quiet neighborhood where she currently lives to a noisy college campus.
“I’m just not a normal college person,” she says, pointing out her preference of a quiet Saturday night with a good book over the loud, alcohol-drenched college party scene.
Her quiet surroundings give her plenty of time to focus on academics. She has spent much of that time writing a book that began as five articles she wrote about her internship. The tentative title for the book is “Untold Stories of the Chronically Ill Child.”
“My advisor said I had way too much good material for that,” she says. She hopes to finish her book by the end of next summer.
