The Asian American Journalists Association is proud to announce Pranav Iyer as the 2020 recipient of the ESPN – AAJA Sports Task Force internship.
“I actually applied for the internship last summer and I went through the final round of interviews and I found out I was actually the runner up,” Iyer said. “I really took this past year to give myself an opportunity to earn this internship and luckily it all worked out.”
Iyer is a senior at Chapman University in Orange, California, where he played for the school’s Division III football team from freshman through junior year, working on the school’s online newspaper, The Panther, while primarily focusing on Chapman News, a weekly live broadcast, and the Chapman Sports Broadcast Network, a student-run sports network with over 30 students. After hanging up the football spikes, Iyer provided color commentary for the team’s broadcast during his senior year.
Now with internship experience at Fox Sports, Spectrum Sports Net in Los Angeles and KTV in the Bay Area, Iyer will start his summer gig at ESPN in June.
“When I heard the news, I was honestly in awe and ESPN is obviously a big company, and even though it’s just an internship, it’s just amazing to be surrounded with such amazing people and some of the top Asian-American journalists come from ESPN,” Iyer said.
“Pranav is an incredible talent, but he’s passionate about being an Asian American and the issues surrounding our community,” said Michael Huang deputy editor of ESPN.com and a member of AAJA’s Sports Task Force. “He has a tremendous future ahead of him and we’re lucky he applied for the internship twice!”
Iyer currently runs AMAZN HQ, a website created to be a destination for Asian-American sports. The website, YouTube channel and Instagram page primarily covers Asian-American issues, like the struggles with identity within football, while curating the highlights of top Asian-American high school stars from across the country.
“A lot of them are undercovered, are very little known of,” Iyer said. “The thing that made me want to pursue them the most was that I knew there were so many great Asian athletes out there but if their stories got publicized more, they would be able to have an impact on the next generation of Asian-American athletes to show that it is really possible, that we can strive through whether that be cultural or societal or racial struggles and have a presence at the highest level.
During his internship, Iyer will work with the ESPN social team. Annual winners also receive an opportunity to attend the annual AAJA conference in addition to the opportunity to work in the Bristol, CT campus. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, Iyer’s internship will take on a remote format.
To find out more about the AAJA Sports Task Force, click here.
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