Henry Adams has been to the west coast and back since he graduated from PALCS in 2022. Now, he’s a network associate at C-SPAN in Washington, D.C. In his own words, here’s how PALCS changed his life:
“I started attending the University Scholars Program at PALCS in the seventh grade. Everything I’ve been able to accomplish since graduating from the program can be traced back to the excellent experience I had.
After graduation, I moved to Southern California to attend Pepperdine, where I initially studied accounting before making a 180 pivot to journalism two years in. I became intimately involved in the student newspaper, the Pepperdine Graphic. I also spent my entire sophomore year studying abroad in Heidelberg, Germany.
During college, I interned at CBS News’ Los Angeles bureau for a summer, where I assisted with the production of Evening News segments, including going on the occasional shoot. I also worked a part-time gig with the Associated Press during election night in 2024.
I recently moved back out east to Washington, D.C. for the Network Associate fellowship at C-SPAN, where I work as a production assistant. This is an early-career position where cohorts of other recent college graduates get a chance to try different assignments around the newsroom for months at a time, building skills in media production and reporting on politics up close.
When I graduated from PALCS and the University Scholars Program, I didn’t have much of a sense of what I wanted to do, just that I wanted to attend school in California like my older siblings had.
Journalism was always in the back of my mind, but the difficulty of the career path daunted me at first, so I initially took the seemingly safer option. But that “easier” option would’ve made my life less fulfilling in the long run.
I would not have been able to guess where I would be now back in June 2022, but the preparation I received at PALCS USP gave me the sense I had a significant leg up as I moved into college and my career beyond.”
