Sandra McGill: Achieving Success Despite Setbacks
By THE CLASS
Sandra McGill, 35, grew up all over the country, but primarily in Stockbridge, Georgia. As a child, her family moved around a lot. Although she and her twin sister, Sabrina, were born in Decatur, Georgia, they lived in Duncanville, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), Alexandria, Virginia (a suburb of Washington, D.C.), and Dublin, California (a suburb of San Francisco) from ages two to seven. She hated moving around and leaving her friends every few months or years. Just before the twins turned eight, their family returned to Georgia, eventually settling in northern Stockbridge about 20 miles south of Atlanta. Sandra watched it grow from a small suburb to a rather large city, as Henry County, in which the city resides, was one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation throughout most of her childhood. She still considers Stockbridge home (mostly because her parents still live there), but it experienced a downturn in economics after many urban residents of neighboring Clayton County flooded the city when Clayton County schools lost their accreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 2008. It’s much different from the town she grew up in, but she fondly remembers playing baseball, riding bikes, and playing other games on the street with other children in her neighborhood until high school, when too much homework got in the way.
She decided to attend the University of Georgia because it offered a unique master’s degree program in the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Health and Medical Journalism program, a relatively new graduate program offered by the university starting in 2010, is one of a very small handful like it in the country.
Sandra, a second-year master’s student, has a 15-year background in the field of biology. When she was working in labs as a research technician, she realized that she much preferred editing her coworkers’ manuscripts to managing transgenic mouse colonies and running polymerase chain reactions. She came to the Grady master’s program because she would like to learn how to write and edit health science articles on a professional level. “My career goals are on track,” she said. She would like to work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a health communications officer or write and/or edit in the field of medical journalism.
She prefers to use a recorder while interviewing. Sandra writes somewhat slowly but very legibly, and finds that her writing becomes too “messy and disorganized” when attempting to write quickly. She also appreciates that using a recorder frees her from feeling pressure to transcribe every word, and allows her to fact-check for accuracy.
Sandra’s favorite written works to date were several pieces that she wrote during her time as a contributing freelance writer to Student Health 101, a digital health magazine based in Massachusetts with a readership of some three million students in the U.S. and Canada. Writing for a college audience often allowed her to infuse her somewhat goofy personality into her articles. These are some of her favorite pieces because she was able to be sarcastic, have fun, and play with words during the writing process.
Her favorite book, or series rather, is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. Sandra loves these books because they grew with their audience in terms of tone and mature themes. In a sense, Rowling was able to appeal to an ageless audience, and the tone of her books matured in unison with her characters and audience.
Not surprisingly, J.K. Rowling is Sandra’s favorite author. In the Harry Potter books, Rowling’s writing style changes as the characters aged: the first book was written for an 11-year-old and her last for a young adult. The themes got more mature. As someone who has written her own children’s novel (unpublished), Sandra finds Rowling’s skill admirable. The author inputted subtle details in the early books and didn’t reveal their explanations until later ones, and it made the series influential for so many around the world.
The most meaningful advice Sandra has gotten she actually learned from her own experiences in adversity. Sandra was diagnosed with a neurological disease in 2008. It troubles her a lot and, while not degenerative, it is unfortunately not curable. Because of it, she had to give up pursuing her Ph.D. degree in Cell and Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and return home to Atlanta, to learn to manage a new life with the support of her family close by. She has heard the adage “things happen for a reason,” but she doesn’t agree with it. What she firmly believes instead is that every storm cloud has a silver lining, meaning good things can come out of any bad situation. For her, the neurological disease is the bad thing. Although she doesn’t know what good things will happen, she has learned positive lessons from it. Now, when she meets someone in trouble, she doesn’t say “it’s going to be all right”; instead, she asks what she can do to help.
In five years, Sandra sees herself as either a health communicator for the CDC or writing health-based local journalism pieces. Sandra said she has yet to decide whether she wants to stay in Atlanta with her family or move away to find work. She initially came to UGA’s Grady College to become a health communicator for the CDC. However, last spring, she traveled to South Georgia with her class and wrote a story on the Easter Seals branch located in Albany. “I fell in love with the people,” Sandra said. This particular experience with her class and writing about the people in South Georgia opened up the option of writing as a journalist about local news.
When Sandra moves back to Atlanta after graduating from UGA, she will miss being in a small, easily drivable town. The sprawl of Atlanta is hard to navigate on a good day, and the traffic is a nightmare!