A Look at Leland

The other day I was able to talk with Leland Ornelaz, a print journalism student at USC. Leland is originally from Oxnard, California and hopes to travel the world someday as a foreign correspondent. Here’s a little bit more about his life and why he wants to be a journalist.

Q: What would you say is something about yourself that most people don’t know?
A: A lot of people know I’m in the military already… or that I was.
Q: You were in the military…
A: I was in the military. I was in the Marine Corps for four years from 1999 to 2003.
Q: So how was that?
A: I loved it. I hated everyday when I was in it, but you know once you get out it’s like I loved it. It was the most fun I ever had.
Q: Where did you go?
A: A lot of different places… I went to Guantanamo Bay before they had the prisoners there. I was in Singapore… Hong Kong… Guam… Japan… I was there for six months… Bahrain… I went to Iraq for a little bit… Dubai… Australia… Seychelles… a bunch of places. I got to travel a lot.
Q: So what do you think it taught you?
A: It taught me the world’s a lot bigger than Oxnard and that I don’t want to stay in Oxnard for my whole life. I liked travel already. It just heightened my love for travel because there’s a lot of things to learn and there’s a lot to see out there. It made me want to get out there and see everything and see the world even more so. That’s one reason I’m in journalism.
Q: What interested you in print journalism?
A: Most of that was traveling with the military and seeing the war and being affected by political decisions from the top by people you don’t even know for the first time. That’s kind of creepy. I’m here. Nobody else really cares or wants to be in this desert, but all of a sudden it’s like the invisible people that we can’t even see say to go in there. It’s really interesting. That and when I was in high school writing was a strong point. That was really the only thing I was good at so I decided to combine the two.