Mira Braneck ’19

Media and Moonshots.

The scholarships and experience Mira Braneck had at Grinnell College shaped who she has become.

In the winter of 2015, Mira Braneck ’19 arrived in Iowa from New Jersey for a campus visit during a horrible ice storm. “I don’t know how we made it from the Des Moines airport to campus in a rental car on a sheet of ice an inch thick,” she recalls. Despite that harrowing experience, she remembers, “when I got to the College, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is it.’”

The ice melted and a few months later, with the support of scholarships that made it possible, Braneck returned to campus as a student. She was an English major, which she long knew she wanted to be, and a Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies major, which she says, “made me rethink what life could be.”

Among many other cocurriculars, Braneck worked at the Scarlet and Black as a staff writer, copy editor, community editor, and news editor. She now realizes, “it’s incredible how much we did as students.” All positions at the Scarlet and Black are paid. She reflects, “Grinnell pays its students to do things, to do work, and I don’t think that’s super common.”

A summer internship at Topix Media Lab in New York City found Braneck leaning heavily on her experiences at the Scarlet and Black when it came time to call sources.

“I didn’t have to think about it. It wasn’t nerve-wracking. It was just something we had always done,” she says. Her experience helped her succeed in the internship, and funding from the College made the internship possible. “It was a really great experience that I just would not have been able to do if I hadn’t had funding.”

In her fourth year, Braneck took an upper-level fiction workshop with assistant professor Dean Bakopoulos, which she credits with preparing her for her post-Grinnell work.

After graduating in 2019, she interned at Restless Books, a publisher of immigrant writing and works in translation. She described Restless Books as “the coming together of a social mission and literature, which I think is very relevant at Grinnell.” Next, she applied to an internship at the Paris Review, which Bakopoulos describes as “one of the best literary journals in the world” and which she thought was a “moonshot.” It turned out, it was a shot she could make.

She is now interning at the Paris Review, and she credits her success getting the internship and in the internship itself to her time at Grinnell and the work she did in the workshop with Bakopoulos.

“The skills I gained in that class I use every day now evaluating submissions,” she says. “What I learned at Grinnell has very much stayed with me, and the excitement has very much stayed with me. Grinnell College completely shaped who I’ve become.”

— by Vishva Nalamalapu ’20