Isabelle Marceles

I started my career in January 2025 as a Roy W. Howard Investigative Reporting Fellow at Connecticut Public Radio after completing my master's degree. I came straight from school, initially starting as a photography major at Arizona State University because I loved film and digital photography. But within a couple weeks, a professor told me I was completely in the wrong major - I didn't like photography as an art form, but I liked to use it to capture the world around me, which definitely falls into the world of journalism. So I switched over to the Cronkite School and had the opportunity to do their accelerated master's program. I graduated a semester early and then immediately went into the master's program, completing it in two semesters. My college experience was all four and a half years, which is crazy to think about. During my time at school, I did so many amazing things - I got to report on Capitol Hill in DC for a summer, did my first documentary in Panama covering an immigration policy that had deported a group of 300 migrants from mostly Asian countries and dropped them in Panama, and I got to meet them and share their story. I also worked on national investigations with the Howard Center, both police reporting doing data and FOIA reporting, and another documentary on science and the FAA dealing with how the FAA doesn't enforce protections for radiation exposure for their workers. My education felt less of that classroom experience and more of doing what I really wanted to do as a career and learning before I even stepped foot in the field as a professional. I received the fellowship through the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University's Cronkite School, which partners with the Scripps Howard family to offer a set of five fellowships per semester to graduates. I'll be at Connecticut Public Radio for a year under that fellowship, working on the investigative team called the Accountability Project, where I focus on juvenile justice, the economy, and education.