A report on Greek economic crisis and its effect on that nation's youth by Edie Nicolaou-Griffin '15 was recently featured on the Huffington Post's national website. Nicolaou-Griffin researched and composed the article in Greece last summer to provide a humanizing insight into broad problems facing Greece and the Eurozone.
Nicolaou-Griffin first considered traveling back to her native Greece last year in Professor Maggie McCarthy's Writing 101 class, "Writing About Film." She explained, "I wrote about a Greek film titled ‘Dogtooth' that was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar. Through that I became interested in doing a larger documentary about the Greek financial crisis."
Nicolaou-Griffin applied for and won a Bank of America Kemp Scholars award to study Greek film in the crisis, from which sprung her idea to further study the activities of youth in the crisis. A journalism scholarship from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which partners with Davidson, allowed Nicolaou-Griffin to conduct her work.
Nicolaou-Griffin gained valuable experience while reporting in Greece, and hopes that others may learn something from her work. "There's a different side to Greece right now than protests, riots, and complaints about the austerity measures," she explained. "Sometimes I had to interview people that I expected I wouldn't agree with, but I learned the importance of objectivity because everyone was having a difficult time there."
Nicolaou-Griffin is interested in pursuing an academic concentration in Film and Media Studies at Davidson, and possibly in creating her own major through the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. She hopes to pursue a career involving writing after graduation.