Other Stories – UDC goes green – Parents struggle to find balance
Model student wins Emmy
BY MELISSA COSTA
In 2004 Cheryl Glanville, a Jamaican-born single mother and an accounting firm secretary in her late twenties, walked into the D.C. Department of Human and Family Services determined to get the tuition assistance she needed to begin her education.
“When I told them that I wanted to learn TV production and become a female Spike Lee, they never laughed. My mom and dad told me I could do it. My son told me I could do it. So I did and everyday that I went to class I thought of them,” recounted Glanville. Just four years after enrolling in the University of the District of Columbia Mass Media degree program, Glanville graduated with a 3.9 point grade average. The next month she received an Emmy for her work during an internship at Washington’s NBC4.
It had been a long journey. Today Glanville’s wide smile does little to reveal those exhausting weeks when she put her son to bed and studied through the night. In spite of her busy schedule, Glanville graduated with only three B’s along side numerous A’s. The same determination and life experience allowed her to excel in her NBC4 internship. At NBC, she joined four other interns and felt out of place at the beginning. All of them were under 21, while she was 31-years-old. Still, there were advantages to age.
“Being a lot older, I had knowledge of general life experiences on my side. I knew how to make things work, limited resources or not,” Glanville explained. Her team finalized five comedic webisode videos called “NBC Interns” and were delighted when the NBC network decided to air the show after Saturday Night Live. In late May 2009, Glanville opened her email box to an enormous surprise: the NBC Interns show had received the 2009 Emmy Certificate for Best Student Production from the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter.
On stage, at the Emmy ceremony, she thanked the National Association of Television and Arts and Science, NBC, and “…my alma mater, the life-changing University of the District of Columbia”. She said, “UDC has given me a foundation to build on, a reason to believe that I deserve to live a good life, just like anyone else who works hard to achieve their dreams.”
Now a college graduate, Glanville is pursuing the next stage of realizing her dreams. She is interning at Future Media Concepts, a well known national digital media training center. She also plans to start her Master’s Degree in Business Management in 2010.
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