For several years, I served as a co-director and director of the Dow Jones News Fund Diversity in Journalism Workshop hosted at the University of Arizona. Part of my duties included recruitment, fundraising, hiring staff, coordinating speakers and workshops, and also developing a curriculum.

The last time I directed the program was in 2012, when I was asked to step in because the previous director, the one who replaced me, was out with an illness. For this program, the focus was on diversity and the students met with professionals from all over the country, including an editor from the Associated Press in Washington, D.C., who was the president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She spoke about both being a woman and a minority in an industry that was dominated by Caucasian males.

I also applied for and was granted a $1,000 grant from the Asian American Journalists Association to be used as supplementary stipends for college students who were selected to be mentors for the high school students and also to create small scholarships for the top three high school students. The scholarships were then presented by the local AAJA co-president and treasurer.