• Current Scholars
• Alumni
• Dream Big
• Scholar Travels
• Scholar Art & Music
• Scholar Stories
• The Scholar Experience

Shani A. Moore Weatherby

Biography

Selected Honors: 2001 Rhodes Scholarship Finalist; Time Incorporated Honors Fellow; International Radio and Television Society Scholar; Scholar-Athlete of the Year; Maryland Teenager of the Year

 

Other Interests: All-American in track and basketball, high school; founder and president, The WRITE Start; minority affairs advisor, Princeton University

 

Athlete, community activist, mentor, reporter -- Shani Moore is following her father's footsteps to become a broadcast journalist, even though the two "never shared a single conversation" because she was 18-months old when he died. Shani was born in Washington, DC, raised in the Bronx, New York and is a first-generation Jamaican immigrant.

 

"I vividly recall hearing tapes of my father's radio news broadcasts when I was a child," she says. "The clarity was generations removed from today's digital quality; static cracks often broke the crisp perfection of his voice. No matter the sounds, however, I savored each moment. The tapes became vital links to a man I desperately wanted to know."

 

Shani says that by listening to these tapes and her mother's "corresponding memories," she formed a "meaningful relationship with her father." And she expects, like her father, to "achieve fulfillment through being a reporter."

 

Achievement certainly has been one of her watchwords. Her service and accomplishments include the following:

 

Barely out of high school, Shani founded a tutoring and mentoring program to help "underachieving middle-school students battle their writing deficiencies by composing their own sports articles." She points out, "Some of my kids went from failing English to being placed in honors courses. Helping them discover how sports could be used to travel through unfamiliar academic territory awakened their aspirations to be students and achievers."

 

Shani is one of only 20 minority affairs advisors to freshmen and sophomores at Princeton. In this role, she is responsible for helping 150 diverse students transition into college and for coordinating "social, intellectual, and cultural events" for them. Her background in conflict resolution, mediation, and counseling for emotional disorders has made her well suited to this endeavor.

 

Through the workshop director for PULSE (Pride, Unity, Leadership, Self-Esteem), based at Trenton High School, she leads discussions to help teenage girls "set goals, make plans for the future, and tackle problems of adolescence."

 

On campus, she is a senior writer for the Daily Princetonian, a reporter for radio station WPRB, and a member of the varsity track-and-field team. For her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Shani has organized blood and clothing drives, a senior-citizen companion program, and sexual assault protection workshops.

 

As a research assistant for William C. Rhoden of The New York Times and a public relations assistant in Princeton's Sports Information office, Shani has had articles published in Sports Illustrated for Kids magazine and internet editions.

 

Building on this record, Shani hopes to pursue a dual master's degree in broadcast journalism and business, with an eye toward anchoring first a local news station, then a national show. But it won't be by position that she will measure her success. Instead, she intends to measure her achievements by "the number of lives that I benefited and the positive impact in strengthening media's role as a civic sentinel."

 

She adds, "Persistence is perhaps my greatest gift and most treasured ability. Throughout my life, the obstacles will change, but my determination to overcome them will not. I will continue to aim high and work hard, because it is the only way I know."

 

Biography prepared in Spring 2002

Other Scholars Like Shani