You may know her as the weather girl, the news anchor, or even as the face of CitrusTV. But there’s more to Campus Celeb Caroline Strange than meets the eye!
Major(s): Broadcast and Digital Journalism, Anthropology, Political Science
Year: Senior (graduating Fall 2015)
Hometown: Madison, Indiana
Current Mood: Terrified, excited and stressed
Pet Peeve: Chewing with your mouth open. I don’t need to see your food.
Guilty Pleasure: Grey’s Anatomy
Starbucks Drink: Caramel Macchiato
Favorite Quote: Well, on my wall it says, “I would give up chocolate, but I’m no quitter.”
Favorite Color: It’s red, but I really like blue.
How are you involvement on campus:?
Citrus TV, because it’s most closely related to what I want to do with my life, but Z89 has a special place in my heart because I started there freshman year as a Fashion Correspondent for Red Carpet Report. So I’ve always done it… My mentor kind of graduated and I was like I want to be you when I grow up, so I asked her if I could take over the show.
You’re a triple major and you’re also graduating early. What have the last three and a half years been like?
I came in with 30 credits so that kind of helped a bit. But I also front-loaded a lot. My first three semesters, I took 18 or 19 credits. So it was really busy and that was why I kind of started with Z89 my first semester. I tried to do track; that didn’t work because I’m not really a runner… then I slowly started adding things. Like I started writing for the D.O. (Daily Orange) my second semester, and I did Juice and Java my first semester sophomore year, and then I really got involved with new. I was going to graduate in three years and then my second semester my sophomore year, I was like, “I’m not ready for the real in a year.” I hadn’t actually done anything that pertains to my major… So it was crazy, and it’s still crazy. Just in different ways.
It seems like you’ve become the Queen of Multitasking. Do you consider yourself a workaholic?
I really enjoy being busy; I think it makes me work better. It is a tough balance sometimes, like do I actually have for al this stuff. But if I go and sit at home, I don’t know what to do, you know? I stare at my phone for a few hours or something. So I like being busy and rushing from one thing to the next, I feel like that’s always the way it’s been. Or not always, because I was homeschooled and that was like nice to sit around and not have anything to do and now there’s so many things I can do, so I want to do everything. And I think that may be part of it: when I was homeschooled I really didn’t have anything to do because I had classes and that was it, or maybe we’d go to a coop or maybe I’d have lacrosse Sunday afternoons, but there wasn’t much I was able to be involved with. Or even in high school, I wasn’t that involved, but I was still busy because I took extra classes when I was in high school. People were like, “what are you doing?” And I just liked to learn.
What was home-schooling like?
Well, my mom was a teacher. So she taught us for a while and then when she started working we were a little bit older and my youngest siblings now go to school. But all of us older ones were homeschooled at least to start off. My sister was actually the first one to go to school full time… It’s just when you’re home schooled, you don’t have to be at other people’s paces. You kind of are on you own time. So it’s a lot of self-motivating at that point. Because when my mom started working, she wasn’t there to teach us. We had syllabi and lesson plans and we had curriculum that we had to follow but it was a lot of you had to actually make yourself do it.
How were you first introduced to the broadcast realm?
I grew up in a library. When I was little I told my mom, “I want to grow up and be a librarian.”My grandma thought I should be a nurse. I think my mom secretly hoped I was going to become a teacher, and I kind of thought about being a teacher for a little while, but I decided I didn’t want to deal with the kids that long. We used to visit the library all the time when I was little, and I did a lot of volunteer work when I was there on a committee that helped plan events. I got them to start a knitting group because I knit and they didn’t have one for teens in my town.
How do you think your years being home-schooled still help you, considering that you’re entering the workforce very soon?
I think it definitely gave me the sense that I had to be self-motivating. I had to sit if I didn’t understand something and ask for help or try to look it up on my own time. So I think in terms of trying to do research and stuff, I have a good basis in that. Also, when I went to boarding school, you had to take a research class. So you had to kind of get in the sense of understanding things and figuring out what it means – doing background work on different stuff. But we didn’t have a yearbook, we didn’t have a paper, we didn’t have a TV station, we didn’t have radio, we didn’t really have that many sports at my high school. It was kind of an odd jump because not a lot of kids in my school go into journalism. I was one of two from a graduating class of 125, who were interested in [journalism]. But my grandpa and I, when I was little, were very close. We still are as much as possible, while we’re 12 hours apart at least by drive. We used to visit a nursing home and he used to read the newspaper, and I used to go with him and just sit there and listen to the news… and I just liked listening to stories and I liked reading.