Five Minutes With Rachel Maddow
Via Campus Progress
By Kay Steiger
Five Minutes With Rachel Maddow
On gay marriage, Chris Matthews, and the youth vote.
CP: You started out doing activism and in academia for a long time and then you made a transition to radio and television. What prompted that transition?
RM: I started doing radio almost on a dare when I was supposed to be finishing my doctoral dissertation. I was living in western Massachusetts. I was crashing with friends. I was doing odd jobs. My scholarship money had run out, and I was not done with my doctorate. Some friends I was living with were connected to this local morning show, and I just showed up to an open audition. I did an on-air open audition, got hired on the spot, and started the next day. At that point I thought it was just going to be one more odd job in a series of very odd jobs, but I really fell in love with it. And after having done that first radio job for a year, I quit so that I could submit my dissertation and do my oral exams and everything, and actually get the doctorate. And I thought that’s it, that would have been my one year in radio, but I missed it a lot. I was like an addict. And I ended up getting the morning show there, and I realized that radio was probably going to be a permanent part of my life.
>Read the rest at Campus Progress.
