Brian Dinh, Neighbor

Brian Dinh first discovered the power of the written word in the eighth grade when he published an angry entry about his girlfriend on his online blog. She read it and consequently broke up with him the next day. (Their so-called relationship was already spiraling downhill anyway.) <br><br>For his first ever journalism assignment back in the beginning of 2010, Brian wrote a short profile about a man who found other men to have no-strings-attached sex with every day via Craigslist. He had never been interested in journalism until then. He came to UCI in the fall of 2008 as a French major, having been inspired by his French teacher in high school. The language wasn’t the same without her in college, so he switched his major to Literary Journalism. He had no experience with reporting any kind of news (besides the gossip going around his circle of high school friends that he wrote about in his blog); rather, he just wanted to write. After college he hoped to go to graduate school to get his English teaching credential and, if he was extremely lucky, find a high school teaching job and forget that he ever had a degree in Literary Journalism.<br><br>The excitement from investigating and writing his Craigslist story, however, pushed Brian to reconsider his interests. A year and a half and five Literary Journalism classes later, he had written about sex, suicide, young children, and everything in between. When his seminar professor Erika Hayasaki recommended that her students consider writing for Patch.com, he took the opportunity to explore journalism outside of his college courses and sent in his résumé. It didn’t list any journalism experiences but it did detail the middle school and high school teaching jobs he had in the past. Brian draws heavily from his teaching experiences when he writes about youth and youth culture. He also enjoys writing about issues pertaining to race and class, drawing from his own experiences growing up as a second generation Vietnamese American and tutoring Latino students of low socioeconomic status. This summer Brian looks forward to writing for Patch.com.