Laura Bollin is a junior journalism student at DePaul University. She was born and raised in Chicago. She still lives at home with her mother, father, sister Michelle, and the family dog, a border collie named Riley.

While at DePaul, she has participated in annual Service Days, a service immersion trip to Washington, D.C., and Catholic groups on campus like Small Faith Communities and Thi3rty. Laura has been a staff writer and an editor for The DePaulia, DePaul University's student-run newspaper. This year, she is working on the paper as a senior writer, and has a weekly column called Demon Decades. She has traveled to New York City, New York, for a workshop with the New York Times, and to Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, Missouri for journalism conventions. She has also written for the Cedar Rapids Gazette during the 2008 Iowa caucus and for the Associated Press during the 2008 Illinois primary.

After returning from what is sure to be an amazing trip with the rest of the Vincentian Mission Fellows and other students, Laura will be traveling to New Orleans with DePaul graduate students to work on a grant writing project in the Tulane-Canal neighborhood.

She is currently an intern with the DePaul Documentary Project, an internship designed to give students a broad range of journalistic experiences. The internship is run by Carol Marin, an NBC 5 and WTTW-11 correspondent, as well as a Chicago Sun-Times columnist; and Don Moseley, an NBC 5 producer. Her Vincentian Mission Fellow mentor is another Sun-Times columnist, Laura Washington.

She hopes to eventually work and write in New Orleans, Louisiana at the Times-Picayune, or write for National Geographic Traveler. As a side job, she would like to be a freelance writer and write articles about volunteer vacations, special tours where participants volunteer in the communities they visit.