She is Lauren Nicole Johnson, a recent graduate from SUNY Albany, at least when she’s in the States.

But during a monthlong stay in Shanghai in 2009, she was catapulted into the world of pseudo-celebrity as Zhoulan (her Chinese name, pronounced joe–LAHN). As an African-American in a predominately Asian city, she felt like a superstar. It all happened after an innocent shopping experience became a public spectacle.

“One minute we were negotiating prices, and all of a sudden people were hovering over us,” she said, describing the experience as “creepy/celebrity.” That aside, she said, her time abroad was amazing.

Her stay in China is one of the events in a series of her past journalistic pursuits.

“Opportunities just present themselves, and I take them,” she said, attributing her personal do-whatever philosophy as the reason she got into graduate school.

She’s worked as an intern at four magazines: Glamour, Water Technology, The Deal Pipeline and The Legislative Gazette.

During her time with The Legislative Gazette, where she covered politics for six months, her favorite experience was writing about the Drop the Rock campaign, part of the strict Rockefeller Drug Law in New York.

“I covered it for a month and was immersed in it,” she said. “It was just real.”

Her interest in writing began when she was 11. She entered a story-writing contest at her middle school, and wrote the prize-winning story that landed on the front page of the school’s paper.

“I was just hyped from then,” she said.

She continued her journalism ambitions by writing for her middle school and high school publications.

She enrolled at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., in 2006. After a year of studies, she had to put her college career on hold for financial reasons, and return to a job at Dunkin’ Donuts, where she had worked since she was 15.

“It was terrible,” she said. “I was really depressed.”

But she raised money, and applied to several colleges; and that work paid off in spring 2008, when she entered SUNY Albany University. She takes her journalistic ambitions one step further this fall, when she will enter the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois in Springfield.

– Aleesa Mann

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