Faces Profile : Leslie Brown

By Kayla Matzke

Senior Leslie Brown put her expertise in copy editing and Spanish to use this summer interning in Quito, Ecuador for V!va Travel Guides.

For over two months she edited travel guides and the company’s Web site in English. Occasionally she translated English-written entries to Spanish online. The internship was unpaid but worth it, she said.

“I was looking for something fun, where I could practice my Spanish too.”

Brown found that the travel company’s standards for editing were different from what she’s learned as a journalism student.

“They have their own style, it’s different (from AP),” she said. Brown also said that editing was important to them, but isn’t stressed to the same degree it is in the J-School. She said her boss was an American and her editor-in-chief was British.

Brown will graduate at the end of fall semester. She is double majoring in Spanish and journalism.

Eventually she hopes to return to South America, but for the immediate future she wants to find a job copy editing and working on Web design. Brown previously spent a year living in Chile.

“Ecuador is different from Chile,” she said. “The Spanish was beautiful.”