NABJ-Chicago Chapter has awarded three $1,000 scholarships to Chicago-area minority students studying journalism at an accredited college/university.

The three very bright recipients are listed below with some information about them!

Eryn Rogers, 20, is a senior at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University completing her bachelors in Broadcast Journalism with a minor in Political Science. Eryn has a 3.3 GPA and graduates June 2012.

An only child, she lives with her parents in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother is an interior designer. Her father is an insurance executive. She attended Marist School, and says, “Being a reporter has been a childhood dream that I have worked to achieve.”

To that end, she was very actively involved with her high-school newspaper as well as its yearbook. And throughout college, she has been equally involved in the Northwestern’s NABJ student chapter, where she has been the  presiding president for the past two years. Eryn also works for the Northwestern News Network, and has completed internships at WSB-TV in Atlanta and KSNT-TV in Topeka, Kan.

This summer, Eryn is interning at MSNBC in New York, at  “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”  “Journalism has been my career of choice for over a decade,” Eryn says. “In the next 10 years, I hope to be a skilled digital journalist. By the end of this decade, I intend to be anchoring and reporting in a large, local market.”

Wendy Osborne, 37, is a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who  completed her bachelors in Journalism in May 2011. Boasting a 3.9 GPA, Wendy continues her studies at Columbia this summer in pursuit of a master’s in Journalism with an emphasis on Public Affairs.

Wendy hails from the twin-island republic of Trinidad and Tobago, where she was born and raised,  one of four daughters of parents who are both pastors. She attended Bishop Anstey High School in the capital, Port-of-Spain, and eventually found her way to Chicago. “As a little girl, I sat fixated on news magazine shows like ‘20/20,’ ‘60 Minutes,’ and ‘Night Line,’ and I fell in love with the notion that issues could be investigated and delivered to the public,” Wendy says. “I saw the power that journalism wielded — the power to uncover, inform, educate, and reveal — and I had respect for that power.” Wendy’s goal is to become an investigative journalist, and hopes in 10 years to have completed her first documentary about homelessness in Chicago, and seek government funding to philanthropically address the issue.

Says Wendy, “All I want to do is evoke change, and I’m using journalism to do so.”

Erik Abron, 20, is a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign completing his  bachelors in Broadcast Journalism with a minor in Communication. Erik has a 3.3 GPA and graduates May 2012. He lives with his parents and younger sister in Evanston, IL. His mother is a senior account manager with Acosta Sales & Marketing, his father, a computer systems analyst for Northern Trust Bank.

He attended Evanston Township High School, and first decided he wanted to be a journalist as a freshman there. “In my biology class, we had to complete a 10-hour internship somewhere that had a science concept/aspect to it. I contacted Mrs. Ondina Norman who had been my first-grade teacher and who I had kept in touch with over the years. I asked her if I could intern down at NBC5 with Mr. Art Norman.” That led to Erik’s shadowing NABJ-Chicago’s Art Norman, and by the time the 10 hours were over, Erik was hooked, interning at the news station for the next five years.

“I plan to use my journalism degree to give a voice to the voiceless. Those people in society who don’t get heard, I want their opinions and feelings present in the media. I also want to display positive images and stories of minorities to the media,” Erik says. “We see so much negativity in the media about minorities that we tend to forget there are still hard working, respectable individuals trying to live their life the right way. Mr. Norman told me I could pay him back by paying it forward. So I hope to one day help the next individual who is deserving.”