The very last thing Camila Domonoske wanted to do after her 2009 high school graduation was go back to school for four more years. Instead, she found that joining AmeriCorps’ Habitat for Humanity was a more appealing way to spend her first year post-high school. Since then, Domonoske has gone on to become a breaking news reporter for National Public Radio (NPR) which started as an internship perfectly tailored to a poetry specializing English major.

Domonoske was accepted to Davidson College in North Carolina, but instead of transitioning from four years of formal education to four more years of formal education, Domonoske deferred her offer from Davidson and took a gap year.

“I did that in part because I was super tired after high school. I worked really hard, I cared a lot about my grades, I worked really hard to stay on top of everything and I was really dedicated to all my extra curricular activities and the thought of doing four more years of that level, I was like ‘I can’t, it’s too much,’” Domonoske said. “So I went and I worked for a year at a job where I worked eight hours a day and when I was done, I was done and there wasn’t any homework. I learned a lot working at a nonprofit, working with volunteers, working in an office for the first time and I really believed in the work that we were doing which was great. It was a great experience.”

Once Domonoske’s year of non profit work was done, she attended Davidson College where she struggled to choose one area of study to specialize in, so she chose the one that had the least strings attached and came with the most open-ended opportunities.

“I picked my major at the last possible minute and picked English because… you could read about anything. You could do non-fiction stuff and it would still be English, you could focus on a certain kind of theory analysis, you could do science writing and it would still be English. It was a way of avoiding specializing because I didn’t want to pick,” Domonoske said.

In the summer before her junior year at Davidson, Domonoske decided to travel to the Philippines to conduct a research project on Filipino activism and how activists differ now from one generation prior.

“The Philippines had what’s called a people’s power revolution. They had a complete overthrow of the government, an authoritarian government, that was launched by popular protest and some very courageous protesters including some people who wound up dying. It was a big historical moment in the Philippines,” Domonoske said. “My question was, ‘What is it like to be an activist and specifically a women’s rights activist now?’ People talked about being treated differently than the previous generation and trying to uphold some of the same things, but also trying to push for different things, like women weren’t a central focus of the previous sort of generation of activism.”

After months of stitching together interviews, Domonoske was able to turn her information into a narrative that was eventually published in an undergraduate journal about young women’s rights activists in the Philippines.

“It took months and months and it was really difficult, so it was great to have the support of the college… I applied, I got funding and then did the trip. I had a great instructor at college who helped me go through all of the interviews and think about what to do with them; how to shape it into a final project,” Domonoske said.

She didn’t know it at the time but the, Philippines was not the only place Domonoske would travel to write and report. After college, Domonoske was unsure of what her next step would be. She graduated Davidson with a degree in English and a specialization in poetry, but how to translate that into a long-term career was not yet a clear path, so Domonoske and her boyfriend, now a boyfriend of twelve years, went to Upstate New York to work at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival.

“I guess my first thought was relief that I [didn’t] have to get a job right away. [I thought] ‘I’m going to go hang out, listen to some opera and be in Upstate New York.’ Then I proceeded to spend that whole summer being really stressed out about getting a job. I got the internship [at New Republic] which was an unpaid internship… [it’s] unfair that this industry requires people to do unpaid internships. It shouldn’t, it’s wrong, but there you go. I worked as a SAT tutor to bring in some money. It was a mixture of relief that I knew my next immediate step followed by immediate anxiety about the step after that.”

However, uncertainty of future plans was not unusual for Domonoske by this point.

“The absolute certainty of of knowing what you need to do next has has been always elusive for me and I feel like realizing how to move forward with my life without that certainty has been one of the big projects of of growing up for me. I was always hoping that I would just turn a corner and it would be clear exactly what I needed to do next and if there is such a corner I still haven’t turned it,” Domonoske said.

Once Domonoske’s time at the Opera Festival was finished, she and her boyfriend moved to Washington D.C. where Domonoske applied to internships in various fields besides journalism.

“I applied for at least 50 different internship fellowships and entry level jobs in D.C. and they weren’t all journalism. Some of the were advocacy focused, some of them were in the nonprofit space. I applied all over and I wound up getting an internship at the New Republic, which is a political magazine,” Domonoske said. “Then from there I got an internship at NPR with the books team, so that was a great job. I was working at NPR, which I love, and I was obviously very excited about that. I worked on poetry coverage so it was perfect, it was wonderful, it was beautiful and it also wasn’t being a reporter. I was totally like ‘This is it, this is what I’m doing and it’s wonderful.’”

After about a year, NPR was no longer able to keep Domonoske as a poetry specialist on the books team, so in order to stay at NPR, she chose to transition to the route of breaking news.

“I switched to news kind of as a way to stay at NPR. I worked weekend evening shifts for a while doing, not just writing, but all kinds of things at NPR. I was doing updates on the homepage and fixing mistakes and editing things and adding photos, you know, doing all of the things at a time that nobody wanted to work as a way of getting more opportunities. I did that for more than a year before I became a reporter,” Domonoske said.

In college finding a major was uncertain, after college finding a career path was uncertain, and now in her current job at NPR, every day to an extent is uncertain.

“I’m not often sent out into the field, I am sometimes, but almost never do I know what I’m going to be doing in a day because it does depend on what’s happened, and what’s happening, and what other people are doing. It is always changing,” Domonoske said. “I do breaking news, I don’t focus on one subject in particular so it appeals to the generalist in me, the same girl who had trouble picking a major. That’s kind of fun that I get to write about everything under the sun.”

An expected day for Domonoske is showing up to work and finding a story to write that can be done from NPR headquarters, but when hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September, Domonoske was given only a few days to pack her bags and get out into the field.

“It was really complicated because the people had an incredible amount of resilience, and strength and courage. They would respond in really hopeful ways to really difficult situations, and you wanted to write about it in a way that both honored their strength and resilience without making it seem like it was okay, because it wasn’t okay,” Domonoske said. “Even if they didn’t want to say they needed help, FEMA trucks still weren’t there providing bottled water. There was help that they deserved that wasn’t coming and even if they were making due without, how to balance the tragedy of the situation with not making them seem helpless when they were in fact really resilient, but in a way that also didn’t make it seem like they had everything under control and no one [needed] to worry when there was a complete unfairness in the way the response was being handled.”

Since high school, Domonoske has gone from AmeriCorps volunteer, to Philippines activism expert, to opera festival intern, and then lastly a breaking news reporter for one of the most trusted news stations in the United States. Domonoske’s high school extracurriculars directly translate to her work now.

“When I was painstakingly learning all of those skills, I didn’t necessarily think, or certainly I didn’t assume, that they would be helpful in the way that they were, but they serve me every day,” Domonoske said. “That’s the dream, to have a job where you do the things that you would want to do even if you weren’t getting paid for them, and that’s literally what I do isn’t it?”