When you teach a student to read the world: Caitlin Dickerson’s CSULB-to-Pulitzer journey

Caitlin Dickerson '11 did not arrive at Cal State Long Beach intending to be a journalist - much less a Pulitzer Prize-winning one.

She loved to read and was relentlessly curious, but her high school in Merced had been so large she often felt invisible. "I just kind of needed somebody to take an interest in me and notice the potential that I had," she said. When that didn't happen, "I floundered."

Fifteen years later, Dickerson is one of the country's most respected investigative journalists whose groundbreaking reports on U.S. immigration policy, including family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, have helped define the national record.

The shift came through sustained exposure - to rigorous ideas, to faculty who paid attention and to an academic culture that valued exploration over ambition.

"I remember feeling like college was a four-year long riddle that I had to solve to figure out what I was meant to do with my life," Dickerson said. "What happened when I got to college was that I was just so deeply interested in what I was studying."

That interest deepened in her chosen major, International Studies.

"One of the best things about [CSULB's] International Studies curriculum was that it was really critical for us to read the news," she said. "My professors always pushed us to connect whatever concepts that we were learning about, even if it was history from hundreds of years ago, to what was happening in the present day."

A professor who paid attention

One of those professors was Richard Marcus, who still teaches in the Global Studies Department. He recalls Dickerson fondly, having exchanged more than 200 emails with her as a student - mostly because precision was one of her hallmarks.

"Caitlin was exacting as a student," Marcus said. "She knew her faculty well, and they already knew how special she was."

For a time, Dickerson set her sights on law school. But while reading all those new stories in Marcus' classes, she began paying increasing attention to the news itself and how it was made.

"I found myself asking, you know, how did this journalist get this person to agree to an interview . . . or how did this journalist get all of this data? How did they analyze it, and then how did they put the story together?"

Those questions became a turning point.

"Journalism was sparking my interest in things that I . . . never thought I would be curious about, and that felt really powerful to me," she said. "Could I get people interested in things that I know are really important but that aren't widely understood?That's kind of become my entire career."

Learning the craft

After graduation, Dickerson applied for "a ton" of internships, eventually landing on NPR's Washington desk, where much of her time was spent transcribing interviews. While "incredibly tedious," she said, it was also transformative.

"I was listening to the techniques of the most decorated and well-established journalists at NPR," she said. "I got to spend months just listening to them and really studying."

From there, she moved through some of the nation's most competitive newsrooms - The New York Times, CNN and ultimately The Atlantic - building a reputation for investigations take years and involve hundreds of interviews.

"I tend to work on stories that nobody else is working on . . . that nobody else thinks is important in the moment."

In 2023, following her reporting on U.S. government's family-separation policy, that approach earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting . Earlier, she and her NPR colleagues received a George Foster Peabody Award for uncovering race-based secret mustard gas testing on American troops during World War II. More recently, she traveled to the Darién Gap to report on the perilous journey migrants undertake through Panama.

The awards helped quiet occasional self-doubt.

"Both felt like the universe almost telling me to keep going, and that I was on the right track," she said.

No shortcuts - just the work

What stands out to now, looking back, is how improbable her path once seemed. Dickerson entered elite national newsrooms without inherited networks or Ivy League shortcuts.

"I showed up in the industry with not one contact - not one single connection - to give me a leg up," she said. "I have a lot of pride about being a Cal State Long Beach grad. It feels good to work alongside colleagues from Harvard and Yale and realize I'm totally able to keep up with them."

These days Dickerson is living in Brooklyn with her husband and working on her first book. Above all, she urges students to enjoy the process and trust their instincts.

"Pursue work that, even at its most daunting, doesn't feel all that much like work."