Susan Tran is a WHDH Channel 7 news reporter living her dream.

“A lot of news goes on in Boston,” said Susan as she talked about the life of a TV news reporter with the Watertown Splash reporters during a recent interview at Watertown Middle School.

It all started out when Susan was a little girl in Los Angeles who loved to watch the news with her dad. She was always good in school but the only complaint her teachers had was that she talked too much.

One day when Susan was watching the news, she realized that the reporter talked for a living. The person that inspired her was Connie Chung, one of the first Asian reporters on TV. Susan loved that she was different and was great at her job.

That is when the idea hit her! In that moment, she knew that she wanted to be a news reporter.

After she knew for sure that was what she wanted to do, she went to Boston University to get a journalism degree. After she finished, she prepared a video in which she pretended that she was a reporter and sent it to TV stations all over the country.

But no one hired her.

She was very disappointed, but she knew that being a reporter was what she wanted to do in life. So, for a while, she worked in the backstage of TV news, sometimes replacing an absent reporter.

After some months, she tried again and mailed more tapes, and still no success.

Tired of trying and failing, she pulled out a map and personally went to six stations in upstate New York, and four offered to hire her. For that she said, “You gotta be persistent.”

Susan has a very busy schedule and she often has at least one story everyday to report about. Because she is usually on live TV, she doesn’t always have time to write down what she wants to say to the camera.

She interviews people (anyone and about anything) and collects information for each story.

“Television is quicker [because there is less time with the audience], so we call it the visual media,’’ she explained.

Every day now she wakes up without knowing who she is going to talk to or where she is going. She is a general assignment reporter, which means that she does every kind of story. She can do one about the music that plays in Fenway Park or a storm that’s coming to Massachusetts.

This process takes four steps:

1) She is assigned a story;

2) She interviews people;

3) She gets as much information as she can;

4) Last, but not least, she delivers her story on camera.

She is usually on live TV for 20 minutes everyday. Susan sometimes gets nervous like everyone else.

She always speaks through a microphone on her shirt. When she is not on camera, Susan usually speaks loudly, but when she is live on TV, she has to speak in a softer voice because if she is loud, it could be problem.

Susan has met all sorts of famous and amazing people in her line of work. She has been doing this for 16 years and enjoys every day if it. She knows her way around the news.

Susan Tran gives information and gets to help people everyday with her reporting.

She never wanted to do anything else.

–March 29, 2014–