Isabel Ord��ez, who will graduate in August with a master's degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia, will be working as intern in the Los Angeles bureau of The Wall Street Journal. Isabel, from Quito, Ecuador, worked as a correspondent for Reuters in Mexico City and Lima last summer. She won a SABEW award for a story she filed on Latin Americans working in the Middle East. She had a stint as a fellow at the San Antonio Express-News and was the editor of the bilingual publication Adelante in Missouri.

Isabel, a native speaker of Spanish, has published in leading newspapers in Mexico and Ecuador. She also speaks Portuguese. Isabel climbed to the summit of a 19,000-foot snow-covered volcano in the Andes and traveled around the world thanks to a job with an airline. She still holds Ecuador's national record for the javelin throw. Her last editor described her reporting style as like a "pit bull."