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J&B Camp offers glimpse of future for Jenny You

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When Jenny Unbi You was 3, she sometimes watched in wonderment as her mom and dad labored as janitors at a computer engineering firm in Minnesota.

Her father, Kun Joo You, had earned a technical college degree in Korea, his homeland.

Here, it qualified him to clean someone else’s office.

Kun and Hye You took night jobs because, as recent immigrants, they didn’t know English. And on that shift they wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

“When I think about it now, I think they (the employers) were completely unfair,” You said. “Back then, I think the rules were a little different.”

You,  18, is an inquisitive, well-spoken, Woodbury (Minn.) High School graduate who will attend the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire to major in journalism and minor in music. She has made a pact with herself to excel and  was one of nine students of color chosen for the university’s first Journalism and Beyond Camp.

“I applied to go to Eau Claire this fall and I got in, and then I started getting e-mails from the college, all sorts of emails, about diversity things.,” she said.

You has been drawn to broadcast journalism since she was a child.

“When I was little, I would say like 10 years old, I would watch the news with my parents,” she said. “Usually  it was entertainment, like celebrity news.”

Then she’d imitate the TV personalities.

But journalism teacher Bonnie Dahl’s  life-threatening illness when Jenny was a sophomore at Woodbury High School was the clincher.

“I  was in her journalism class that year,” she recalled. “And she just stopped showing up for class, and we didn’t know why. Then the principal made an announcement, that she was diagnosed with cancer.  And she would show up once in a while to class, and each time she was skinnier and more frail, and soon she couldn’t even show up for the newspaper meetings.”

“So my friends and I decided to join the newspaper team, because we knew that things wouldn’t get done as much when she wasn’t there.”

That nudged her farther along a path toward a career in journalism.

Already, You has 26 college credits in areas as wide-ranging as sociology, advanced piano and weight training from Century College in White Bear, Minn. , that she’ll transfer to UWEC.

“I decided I wanted to get some general credits out of the way,” she said. “So I’ll be graduating in three years, hopefully.”

Journalism and Beyond  appealed to her deep-seated sense of social justice.

“This whole camp is about diversity and how people of color can speak up, too,” she said. “Basically, whenever I’ve seen the news there just aren’t that many people of color.”

She remembers her parents and their enforced silence.

“Lots of minorities, they just came here, and they don’t want to stick out, because they’re minorities,” she said.

The journalism boot camp sheds a glimmer of hope that change is in the offing.

“I think the media is evolving a little bit, and my generation can step up a little bit more and make the media more diverse, whether it’s in newspapers or on TV.”

Kun Joo You is now an IT network engineer, as he had wanted to be when he moved to the United States and sent for his wife and young daughter.  Here they had two more children, Angie, 13, and Christopher, 7.

Her father’s success emboldens Jenny.

“It makes me realize that as long as you’re good at what you do and you work hard for what you want, you end up with what you worked for,” Jenny said.

And like her father, Jenny, whose middle name means silver rain, has dreams to chase too.

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