Two J-School students win prestigious OPC Foundation award

Andersen and Reddick were among 15 aspiring foreign correspondents selected by a panel of leading journalists from a pool of 175 applicants from 50 different colleges and universities. Acclaimed foreign correspondent, author and filmmaker Sebastian Junger was the keynote speaker at the awards ceremony.

Andersen was the recipient of the Walter Cronkite Scholarship. He has an OPC Foundation fellowship in the Bangkok bureau of the Associated Press. In his winning essay, Andersen, a graduate of UC-Santa Barbara with a master’s degree in international relations from San Francisco State University, wrote about the economic and environmental problems posed by the 172-mile Nicaragua Canal. He received the award from Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews of CBS News.

Reddick received the Irene Corbally Kuhn Award from Jack Howard-Potter of the Scripts Howard Foundation and the Pamela Howard Family Foundation. Reddick’s essay was about his experiences working as a journalist in Beirut when the Arab Spring erupted in 2011. He is a graduate of Lewis & Clark College.

The award winners were also honored with a reception at Reuters the night before the luncheon, hosted by Reuters’ editor-in-chief Stephen Adler. On Saturday they received risk management and situational awareness training from Global Journalist Security at The Associated Press headquarters in New York City. They also met privately with editors from BuzzFeed and the New York Times in a special breakfast held the morning of the awards presentation.

The OPC Foundation is the nation’s largest and most visible scholarship program encouraging aspiring journalists to pursue careers as foreign correspondents. Media organizations at the luncheon included AP, Bloomberg, CBS News, GlobalPost/GroundTruth Project, IBT Media, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal.

For more information on the OPC Foundation and its scholarship program, visit the OPC Foundation website.