Thatcher Warrick Hess

Bilingual Journalism M.A. Student

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  • Specialty: I am Thatcher Warrick Hess. I will be in the Bilingual Journalism program as a graduate student. I am a University of Arizona alumni, receiving double majors History and Hispanic Linguistics and double minors in Portuguese and Film/TV in 2019. I am a trilingual investigative journalist, speaking both Spanish and Portuguese fluently. My areas of interest specifically are linguistics (phonetics and morphology), Portuguese dialectal variation and historical investigative journalism. During my nine month long ETA Fulbright scholarship teaching English in Brazil in 2022 I also worked on a side project: a podcast. I made the third season of my historical investigative podcast Object Obscura, where I attempt to find the person who originally owned an antique object. Each of the five episodes were in English and Portuguese. I conducted over 20 interviews in Portuguese and traveled to over 5 different Brazilian cities. I created a DBA for my multimedia ventures called the Obscurity Podcast Network. In the future I hope to be working for and continuing my multimedia journalism career with my own company.
  • Areas of interest: I was born in Santa Cruz, California. As a kid I went to a Montessouri school in the Bay Area near San Francisco and later into charter middle school. So most of my early student life I got to choose what classes were intriguing to me. I started learning Spanish when I was about six years old. Years later at the same school I decided to take a Mandarin Chinese class for three years. In middle school I was given the opportunity to learn Arabic on Rosetta Stone for one year. These were the early stepping stones of foreign language learning that I want to utilize in my daily life as a journalist. I don't only want to interview other people in a foreign language, but I want to ask them about their native language.
  • Undergrad Degree: History and Hispanic Linguistics and double minors in Portuguese and Film/TV.
  • Background/Goals: Outside of journalism I have many hobbies: I play soccer, table tennis and ultimate frisbee. I am also a cruciverbalist (I design crossword puzzles). I collect antiques. Finally, I am an artist as well, I illustrate photorealistic pencil drawings and make mixed-media collages.
  • Why UA: I want to return to the University of Arizona to be a part of a Master's degree that I didn't know existed during my undergraduate career. This Master's program started in 2019 when I was graduating. In response to waiting two and a half years for the Fulbright Scholarship to commence after Covid, this program at the University of Arizona felt like the perfect fit at the right time.