"I've always wanted to change something for the better," says Kristen Orlando. As an intern at WBNS-TV in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, the Kenyon senior got to do just that.

In the summer of 2003, Orlando joined a team of journalists investigating medical neglect in the state's prisons. Orlando toured three prisons and conducted interviews across the state. "I did nothing but eat, breathe, and sleep prison medicine," she says. "I immersed myself greatly in research, digging through thousands of e-mails and internal memos." The investigation became one of the biggest stories of the summer in central Ohio, attracting the interest of Governor Bob Taft, who promised changes to the prison medical system. Her work earned her the Ohio Associated Press Scholarship in May 2004.

Orlando returned to WBNS in the summer of 2004 to serve as the station's first convergence intern, a program that allowed her to work for the television station and the Columbus Dispatch, the city's daily newspaper. At the same time, she worked as an associate producer at WBNS.

An English major, Orlando honed her writing skills in her sophomore creative fiction class with Writer in Residence P. F. Kluge. Classes in screenwriting and playwriting taught her to write dialogue, a valuable skill in broadcasting. "You're writing for the ear," she says. "You have to make the scripts informative and understandable."

Investigative journalism can have a positive impact on a community, Orlando suggests, something that draws her to a field she finds exciting.

"I hope I never lose that," says Orlando, who plans to work as a journalist after graduation. "I never want journalism to be just a job for me."