Alumni profile: Veronika Pitrová

In this alumni profile Czech Veronika Pitrova explains how studying with journalists from around the world has impacted her career.

Veronika Pitrová / Czech Republic
Mundus Cohort 2010-2012 / Amsterdam

Veronika Pitrová is an international news reporter based in Prague for Czech TV. She graduated from the Mundus Journalism in 2012 after completing a specialisation in media and politics at the University of Amsterdam. She cites meeting the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as doing an interview with Admiral Mike Muller, former highest military adviser to the US president, as highlights of her career so far.

Creating an international network of contacts has been one of the most important factors of the Mundus Journalism programme for Veronika. She regularly communicates with former classmates, drawing upon a powerful alumni network that is especially helpful in her job.

“Having direct access to people from so many countries is just so handy for an international news reporter because everywhere you go you know someone or you know someone who knows someone,” she says.

“Sometimes when I need to check something in a language which I know some of my contacts speak, I just go to Facebook and see who is online and could help me. Numerous times my colleagues were wondering what I was doing on Facebook when we were all trying to find something out, but then eventually my contact was faster and it helped me.”

Beyond gaining a network of professional contacts, Veronika says the personal friendships that she made during the Mundus Journalism programme will stay with her forever. The experience of living abroad in Aarhus, Sydney and Amsterdam, coupled with meeting people not just from these countries but from all across the world, opened her eyes to new perspectives and different approaches to understanding journalism in a globalised world.

“There were obviously some down sides of the programme as well, but compared to the gains, these are just marginal things. Without exaggeration, the two years on the Mundus Journalism programme were life changing experiences for me and if I could, I would do it again.”

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