As Hurricane Helene wrought havoc over huge swathes of the mountain Southeast in late September, one Mount St. Mary’s University graduate discovered the unseen benefits of challenging experiences he faced as an undergraduate while he reported on the storm to his new community.
This January, Collin Riviello, C’20, who was born in Nanjing, China and raised in Derwood, Maryland, relocated to Greenville, South Carolina, and began work as a reporter for WSPA, a news station based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and serving western North and South Carolina.
A mere nine months later, he was responsible for sharing accurate, timely information amid one of the most destructive natural disasters ever to hit his area.
“It was eye-opening, and humbling. I lost power but wasn’t as affected by the destruction. It didn’t really register until I went to Asheville [North Carolina] to report on conditions there,” Riviello shared. “I grew up safe, privileged enough to never have experienced this sort of situation, and seeing the suffering of the people around me took me down a peg.”
Riviello cited his year as a student teacher in Thurmont, Maryland—he was an English and secondary education major at the Mount—as a time of learning how to relate to people from a variety of different backgrounds, lessons that have served him well as he worked with locals and fellow reporters during Helene.
“A couple of weeks after the storm, I was talking with a woman who had a tree fall on her home and had no 
electricity. She didn’t have the resources to hire someone to remove the tree, and she felt abandoned by the county. I saw the other side of it, and how hard officials in her county were working to assist everyone, but I saw her frustration, too. It was my time as a student teacher that helped me in situations like this, where I had to share people’s stories and concerns in a way that respected everyone involved,” he explained.
The after-effects of the storm led Riviello to realize how dependent we are on each other, and how tragedy in a small, rural town can have national or international ripples. He gave as an example the flooding that cut off Marion, North Carolina from the rest of the world. Marion is home to the plant for Baxter International, an IV manufacturer that supplies nearly two-thirds of the nation’s hospitals. Patients across the nation suffered shortages for weeks before Marion was accessible, and suddenly every piece of information concerning Marion, and other towns in the area, became critically important to many.
“I realized I could be a voice to bring national news to local people,” Riviello noted.
As he interviewed locals in the most deeply affected neighborhoods, people often suffering huge losses, he turned back to another experience he’d had at the Mount: his time as a resident assistant (RA).
As an RA, he unexpectedly had to assist a student he didn’t know very well through a mental health crisis. “During that time of trying to help that student and wait for another RA to come assist me, I heard a lot of things that our training videos told us we’d hear someone say in this sort of situation. But being face to face with someone in that situation really humanizes you,” Riviello exclaimed.
“I saw that I needed to just try to talk to them, try to relate to them and see what they’re going through and help the actual person in front of me, and the Mount helped teach me that.”
He initially planned to work as an English teacher and had to take a leap of faith in attending a journalism and broadcasting master’s program. But Riviello shared that he sees now how his undergraduate experience was working in his favor all along.