Hello, I’m Maya (she/her).

I’m an incoming law student at the University of California, Berkeley with an interest in public policy, especially environmental law.

In my past life, I was a full-time journalist for seven years. I was based in Washington, D.C., where I was the deputy production director at POLITICO. My role involved directly overseeing producers while co-managing the company’s production and copy-editing team. I incorporated diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as career development and mentorship into my role. I also worked on style and standards guidance, as well as improving workflows and finding efficiencies. Keeping up with my roots as a writer, I was a regular contributor to Women Rule and before that, I co-authored POLITICO Pro’s Afternoon Energy newsletter.

Before joining POLITICO as a web producer in early 2017, I worked for Bustle.com as a News/Politics writer and did editorial work for a multimedia news website and for a community newspaper. I live for the intersection of excellent writing and social change — one of the projects I worked on, Syracuse Jobs Matter, helped bring light to the serious issue of racially concentrated poverty in the Syracuse, N.Y., community.

I went to Syracuse University, where I got a Bachelor’s in Newspaper & Online Journalism and Political Science. In my free time, I enjoy improv, reading and writing fiction; I was an English minor and I contributed to my university’s literary magazine. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’ve also been lucky enough to have traveled extensively. My extended family lives in India, and I studied abroad in Strasbourg, France during college.

If you know of any opportunities I’d be interested in, feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected].