Academics

Students' international experience brings valuable perspective to newscast

Weekly 'Centre County Report' by College of Communications students benefits from diversity

Valentina Ndibalema, who was born in Sudan, and Nana Kennedy-Kwofie, who was born in Switzerland, are two of several international students who bring important perspectives to "Centre County Report," the weekly TV newscast produced by Penn State communications students. Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

“Centre County Report (CCR),” the weekly newscast produced by the students in the College of Communications, serves as a source of news and information to the residents of Centre County and beyond.

The show covers reaches some 530,000 households in 29 counties of Central Pennsylvania.

But, while the show itself has a local flare, some of the students who produce it have international roots.

Five seniors majoring in broadcast journalism between the two “CCR” classes have international backgrounds ranging from Africa to Colombia to Kosovo to Switzerland. With a variety of life stories and experiences, each student brings a unique perspective to life in the United States and American media.

Laura BarbosaBorn and raised in Bogota, Colombia, Barbosa speaks fluent Spanish and moved to the United States in the midst of turmoil when she was 6 years old.

At the time, her mom was the vice president of a construction company and her dad had a limo service.

“It actually happened that it was around the turmoil time of guerilla warfare. All that time during the ’90s and late ’90s, Colombia was not really a great place to be,” said Barbosa.

Because of the warfare and fear of threats, Barbosa’s mother decided to flee the country.

The family moved to Miami in November 2000, and three months later relocated to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Barbosa’s parents earned business degrees in Colombia, but those degrees did not help in the United States. They found themselves having to start from scratch.

In time, though, her mom became a paraprofessional, helping young people who had just moved into the country assimilate themselves into the classroom and her dad ended up making a living by owning his own trucking business.

“The first couple years were really, really hard for us because we came from knowing this lifestyle and then coming here and learning the hard way of the ‘American Dream’ and how to earn your money here for a couple of years,” said Barbosa.

After moving to the United States, Barbosa’s parents made sure she spoke Spanish in the household. Her family didn’t want her to lose her first language. This will be a valuable skill moving forward in the broadcast business -- something she wanted to be involved in since she was in sixth grade.

“My parents actually would make me, every night, watch the news in English with closed captions,” said Barbosa. “They made me sit down and watch it and I just remember looking at these anchors and how poised and how professional and how they looked so put together and I could understand everything they were saying.

“I want to be able to communicate with more than just one person, with the whole audience and tell them my story and then tell them other people’s stories,” she said.

Now, Barbosa is beginning to look into jobs. One day, she hopes to live on the West Coast, and she wants to participate in documentary-style reporting, with an ultimate goal of being a creative director for a TV network. “CCR” helped her find that passion.

“Now, I have amazing professional things to put on my reel to send out to directors. I think that’s really the importance of ‘CCR’ to get your feet wet in what you want to do,” said Barbosa. “After ‘CCR’ you’re going to realize if you want to do this or not and I absolutely want to do it.”

Alexandra HoganBorn in Switzerland, Hogan has lived in Minnesota, Israel, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, back to Switzerland for seven years, then to south Florida for high school.

“(My parents) both had dreams of moving out of the country and seeing the world so my dad went into medical business and my mother became a flight attendant,” said Hogan.

Hogan and her family, which is originally from Minnesota, were frequently on the move due to her father’s job with Medtronic, a medical device company. Hogan and her family moved the United States when she was nearly 15 after spending the previous seven years in Switzerland. Even after moving here, the family still returned to Switzerland each summer.

With her dad now retired, her family is in a transition process to Park City, Utah, as they found it to be the closest thing to Switzerland that they could find in the United States.

In the meantime, Hogan is also in a transition period. Set to graduate in May, she will be starting her career in the United States, rather than going back to Switzerland.

“I’m very goal-oriented in terms of pursuing my dreams of becoming a reporter and there isn’t much of a media outlet for me to pursue that dream in in Switzerland,” said Hogan. “They don’t have the 24-hour news coverage that exists in the U.S. People don’t really sit and watch the news because there isn’t the news the way it is here.”

Hogan, who has wanted to be a reporter since she was 12, came to Penn State because of its communications program and the opportunities it would provide her. She also wanted a big school that provided her a “college experience” unlike she would have received in Europe.

“You pretty much just go there for your specific major (in Europe),” said Hogan. “There are no clubs. There are no sports. There isn’t a passion for loving your school. You go there to do your studies and then you go home.

“I think I’ve had a great college experience. I’ve loved my time here. I really wanted to be on the ‘Centre County Report’ when I came and visited Penn State. Being in that my last semester is really rewarding.”

Now, with her future approaching, she isn’t afraid to go anywhere in the country. Moving 12 times in her life has helped make those kinds of transitions easier. When she came to Penn State, and in all of the other moves in her life, she hasn’t known anyone. That will come in handy as she wants to work her way up through different TV stations and market sizes to begin her career.

“There isn’t anywhere that I’d go back to and it feels like, ‘Wow, I’m home,’ unless I’m in Switzerland, which is good, I guess, for the career because I’m going to be moving around a lot,” said Hogan.

VIDEO: Valentina Ndibalema and Nana Kennedy-Wolfe co-anchor an episode of "Centre County Report"

Nana Kennedy-KwofieWhile Kennedy-Kwofie, who speaks English and French fluently, was born in and has spent the most time in Switzerland, she has lived in many other places, including: Democratic Republic of Congo, England, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Switzerland. Her family moved on a regular basis because her mother was working for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Despite only living in Ghana for a short period of time, she still visits her family’s native country. Right now, though, home is always changing as her mom is in Hungary and her brothers are in England.

“Home for me is wherever my mother and brothers are whenever we’re all together,” said Kennedy-Kwofie. “I don’t really call it a specific place, but it’s being with my mother and my brothers.”

Even so, she still considers herself Ghanaian.  

“I think Switzerland was a place where I lived that was sort of a transition period. I was growing up. It reminds me of my childhood. But Ghana, I love Ghanaian food. I love Ghanaian music,” said Kennedy-Kwofie. “As I’ve grown up, I’ve tried to embrace my African culture. It’s something that has been with me since the beginning I guess.”

Kennedy-Kwofie came to the United States on her own, and randomly chose Penn State, originally intending to major in economics. But in part because she had been making videos since she was young, she followed her passion and ended up in broadcast journalism.

While most things are the same for Kennedy-Kwofie, she has picked up some new things while in the United States. She now says “pants” instead of “trousers” and “popsicle” instead of “lolli.” All in all, moving around a lot has helped her adjust to life in a new country.

“I think moving around has made me a lot more open-minded of the types of people I meet. I feel like the world is a very big place, but it’s also very small because you never know who you will meet,” she said. “I don’t get shocked by people very often.”

Her goal is to someday return to Africa to report the news and make documentaries in an attempt to change the narrative of Africa. Kennedy-Kwofie says journalism seems more appreciated in the United States and there is more storytelling, but that there is a lot of potential in Africa.

“I think one thing that I do sort of miss from back home, there’s a culture of storytelling. My grandmother used to sell rice to kids for lunch, but she was also the local storyteller,” she said. “There’s an oral storytelling tradition that I kind of want to capture.”

Valentina NdibalemaBorn in Sudan with her family, which is originally from Tanzania, Ndibalema has seen a good portion of the world, including Switzerland, Barcelona, South Africa, China, Russia and Canada -- all a result of her father’s job with the UNHCR. Ndibalema even lived near and knew Kennedy-Kwofie while in Switzerland.

“The first time I got the full experience of living in America was actually coming here for these four years of college,” said Ndibalema.

Home for her is Switzerland, where she has mostly lived since she was 9 years old. But, Ndibalema and her family didn’t forget about their roots, splitting summer and winter breaks between Switzerland and Tanzania.

Ndibalema, who speaks English, French and Swahili, wanted to come to the United States because she knew she wanted to study broadcast journalism, and felt like this was the best country to fulfill that dream. She had originally planned on attending Syracuse, but after doing a tour of the Penn State campus, she knew it was a fit.

“As soon as I came back to my hotel room, I applied right away to Penn State,” said Ndibalema.

According to Ndibalema, there are five other Penn State students on campus from her home city in Switzerland, and three from the same school. From that group, she sees Kennedy-Kwofie every day.

While here, she certainly found different experiences. That includes more purchasing power when buying things; a small-but-significant difference in McFlurries at McDonald’s (with M&Ms crushed here but not in Switzerland); and, of course, driving on the right side of the road in the U.S.

Another difference is college campuses with school spirit, which she said is completely different than universities in Switzerland. There’s also football here, which Ndibalema admittedly knows nothing about, but she has attended every game at Beaver Stadium since arriving at Penn State.

She has also done work in the classroom, using “CCR” to gain valuable experience to help her reach her goals. Ndibalema plans to attend a master’s program, and someday hopes to return to Tanzania to add her perspectives to the growing media presence in Africa.

“Me being able to anchor for ‘CCR’ and go live and have my face seen and everything that we put together whether it’s the packages and anything that we edit to be seen on such a grand scale within Centre County, it’s incredible for me to have that opportunity because I know I would not have received that at home,” Ndibalema said.

Regardless, she has taken advantage of all that she could.

“I came in here with a goal of do as much as you can, see as much as you can and learn as much as you can. I feel like in my four years I pretty much milked my experience as much as I could and I still have two more months to try to fit as much as I can in,” she said. “I can leave Penn State happily knowing that I 100 percent had the best experience of my life and that was all because I pushed myself to make sure that happened. I’ll forever be a Nittany Lion.”

Leart Vuciterna“It was a feeling of rush.”

Vuciterna was 6 years old when his family fled Kosovo.

At the time, ethnic tensions grew between the Kosovo Albanians, who accounted for most of Kosovo’s population, and the Serbians, who wanted to control the area. When Serbian Slobodan Milošević became the leader of Yugoslavia, he began to try to force Albanians out of Kosovo. This included Vuciterna and his family in 1999 because of the war and genocide.

“Life was normal. It was just ordinary like here,” said Vuciterna. “I feel like the tension was always there. There were Serbians always living there. They were kind of like authority. It was a long time coming.

“I feel like all of a sudden it was like, ‘Get up, we have to go,’ because they were cutting off a bunch of exits in Kosovo. There was only a certain amount of time to leave before the bombings came.”

The process wasn’t an easy one. After fleeing to Turkey, the family went back to Albania, then back to Turkey, where they stayed until they found out they could make their way to the Staten Island, New York, where Vuciterna had an uncle from his dad’s side of the family.

Vuciterna can still vividly remember a moment when his family was trying to leave Kosovo.

“We were in a crowd and there was a plane in front of us,” said Vuciterna. “They had one guy standing there and one of the Serbian officers was pointing a gun to his head. I think he was going to make an example of him in front of all of us in case we were trying to pull something off.

“I think the guy was trying to leave the scene and we weren’t allowed to move. I remember my mom screaming and crying and kind of telling the officer to let him live and that he wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t know who he was. She was just trying to voice herself and make sure he wouldn’t do something so unfortunate.”

Now that Kosovo is independent and rebuilding itself, and he’s a U.S. citizen, Vuciterna still gets back to visit his dad and some other family members each summer. His mom and his brother stayed in America, where he lived in Wayne, New Jersey, before moving to White Plains, New York, last May.

Vuciterna always wanted to attend a big school. He toured at Penn State and also applied to Rutgers, but in the end decided to be a Nittany Lion.

Since coming to Penn State, Vuciterna says “CCR” has been the “best and most unique experience” he’s had.

“When I got accepted in ‘CCR,’ it was like I couldn’t believe it. To this point, a month in, I was a producer for four weeks. That was literally the best experience I think I’ve ever gotten as far as coming close to TV.”

What they bring ‘CCR’According to Steve Kraycik, director of student television and online operations, students with international backgrounds don’t typically face many challenges in “Centre County Report.” Sometimes, for those whose first language may not be English or those who have a heavy accent, they may need to work harder on pronunciations and clear communication.

Kraycik said these five students add significant value to the newscast’s reporting because of their unique perspectives.

“They’ve lived in places that are far different from Central Pennsylvania and it helps to have their voices and outlook on the stories we’re doing here,” said Kraycik. “They also bring diversity to our news team, which is critical because viewers in news markets across the country are becoming increasingly diverse.”

Last Updated June 2, 2021