The technical aspect of television is what drew Ines Rosales ’04 to Montclair State. But, just a few short years after graduating, she has moved from behind the camera to in front of it.  Since 2007, Rosales has been the traffic correspondent for Fox 5 Television’s “Good Day New York” and has found that she likes being on camera as much as she liked being behind the scenes.

Rosales wasn’t an on-air reporter when she began working at Metro Traffic, her first job after graduating from Montclair State. “I was a camera operator,” she says.  “After a while, they suggested I try going in front of the camera, so I did.”  It took a lot of work to learn the ropes of being in front of the camera but Rosales soon became comfortable with reporting and when Fox 5 had an opening for a traffic correspondent, she applied and got the job.

She credits the broadcast program at Montclair State for preparing her for the rigors of the profession. “I’m really glad I chose Montclair,” says Rosales. “It was a demanding program but really prepared you for the real world.” Rosales recalls how she and her fellow broadcast majors thought Larry Londino, chair of the Department of Broadcasting, was really tough. “But if I saw him now,” she laughs, “I’d tell him ‘You are such a pushover compared to the people in the real world!’”

Rosales became interested in the technical side of broadcasting during her senior year at Belleville High School and decided to attend Montclair State because of the broadcast program.  “I had heard great things about Montclair,” she says. “You got personalized attention from faculty because the department was relatively small.”

Her advice to those trying to break into the broadcast industry is “Nothing in life is easy; you just need to keep trying.”  Rosales certainly isn’t taking it easy: her day begins at 2:30 a.m. and she commutes into Manhattan to start work at 3:30 a.m.  Though the hours are early and the work is demanding, she has taken it all in stride and looks on the positive side, saying, “I’m usually done around 10 or 11 [a.m.] and I have the rest of the day off.”

She laughs as she brings up another plus to her early hours: “The good thing about it is that I don’t have to deal with traffic.”