Missing Representation is Eric Schmid’s senior capstone reporting project and completes his undergraduate education at Stony Brook University.

Schmid spent three months during the Spring 2018 semester speaking with dozens of people, from teachers and administrators to other advocates of teachers-of-color, to learn about the issues that surround teacher diversity. Schmid first became interested in educator diversity when he found a Newsday article from 2013 that said about 88 percent of Long Island teachers were white. He sought to learn what problems arise from having nearly all white teaching staffs and how diverse teachers can help alleviate those problems.

All journalism students at Stony Brook University must complete the senior capstone project to graduate. It combines a text piece, a video piece and any other multimedia elements into a website to present the project. Schmid designed this website with the Divi Builder plugin for WordPress and with custom HTML and CSS. He also wrote the jquery code for the data visualization(s) that appear in the story.

Eric Schmid is a multimedia journalist interested in reporting through photography, video and audio. He graduated from Stony Brook University with a Bachelors of Arts degree in Journalism in May 2018. He was the Journalism School Valedictorian and earned his degree with the Summa Cum Laude distinction.

Audio journalism is one of Schmid’s passions and this semester he returned to work at WSHU Public Radio, an NPR member station, as a News Fellow at its Long Island Bureau. He first interned for WSHU in the fall of 2016 where he discovered his passion for audio journalism and storytelling. At the radio station, he wrote and produced articles on deadline for daily airing and also produced longer sound-rich feature articles.

Last summer, Schmid worked at Fox News as the College Associate for Shepard Smith Reporting. While there, he pitched story ideas, wrote copy and cut video for the show. His work also appears in Stony Brook’s student-run campus paper, The Statesman, whose multimedia section he also edited. While at Stony Brook University Schmid was named to the Dean's List every semester.

Schmid has a passion for all things digital and aspires to a career in radio journalism. He also wants to travel the world with his camera to find its interesting and unusual places. A goal of his is to photograph the aurora borealis. He would also like to travel, photograph and tell the unique stories of the 50 United States.

After graduation, Schmid is a video producing intern for AccuWeather in State College, Pennsylvania as a 2018 Dow Jones News Fund Digital Media Intern.