Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Jessica Ullian | Photograph by JOSEE MATELA

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.

“I want to cover international affairs,” she says, “whether it be a human rights long-form feature or an investigative look into a country’s politics.” Matela says her experience at the UN summit helped show her “how important communication is to crossing boundaries and addressing problems across the globe” and gave her confidence in the journalistic voice she has been honing at BU.

There’s no age limit. My youth means that I can, along with my generation, evolve the journalism field.

— Josee Matela (CAS’20, COM’20) —

The New Jersey native spent her first two years at BU channeling her passion through jobs and internships at the University’s various news outlets, including producing BUTV10’s student-run daily news show. “I’m taking these years to do the most immersive career research I can,” says Matela, who’s reported on subjects including race and gender in the sports industry, combating antibiotic resistance, and Snapchat’s efforts to curtail fake news.

She’s also been a producer for REACT News, the online video news offshoot of BU’s International Relations Review, an undergraduate-run journal. There, she oversees interviews with key political, intellectual, and social experts from around the world. Her interview with Munira Khalif, the Harvard undergraduate who served as the sixth United States Youth Observer to the UN, was particularly exciting, she says, because Khalif urged students to see their youth as an asset, not a detriment.

“I realized that she was just a year older than me, and she’s representing the United States at the United Nations,” Matela says. “This is the stuff I want to be doing, and there’s no age limit. My youth means that I can, along with my generation, evolve the journalism field.”

Her ambition is to land a reporting job at the BBC, which is one reason she’s heading to London next spring through the BU study abroad program. She’ll take classes in international relations and journalism and complete a journalism internship through which she plans to study Brexit “because it changes international relations indefinitely,” she says.

“With a voice comes responsibility,” Matela says. “I intend to use my voice to tell the stories that matter. By sharing perspectives and creating connections, I want to use my voice as a medium to create dialogue.”