Guest Speaker Recap: Erin Grace

Erin Grace was a very interesting and informative guest speaker when she visited UNO last Thursday. Grace is a strategic communications manager for NCITE (National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, Education Center), and she had a lot of interesting stories to tell about her current job and her past job as a writer for the Omaha World Herald.

For her current job with NCITE, Grace was able to share a lot of information about what she and the company does. She showed our class how to navigate through their website, which gives a lot of insight about what the company does and how to get involved. She mentioned how they are looking to hire UNO students for certain roles and shared the benefits of us getting involved with NCITE. She also discussed a big opportunity for a story about NCITE, which has already been discussed by NPR.

When talking about her previous job as a writer for the Omaha World Harold, Grace shared numerous interesting stories that she or her coworkers made. One of the most notable was a story made while she was there about two coworkers at a lawyer firm who after years working together came to the realization that they shared the same father. You could tell that she was very good at capturing an audience, because regardless of whether she was talking about one of her stories or a story of a coworker, she did a fantastic job getting the entire classes attention in a matter of seconds. She was able to quickly set the scene before reading and get everybody locked in to what she was saying.

Overall, Erin Grace was a great guest speaker. She told us about her career, but also gave lots of information about the future of journalism and how we can get plugged in. It was a great time, and I’m so glad I was there to witness it.