By JOE PANGBURN

When Nicole Santa Cruz is tossed out of her comfort zone, she hits the ground running.

“I was the first in my family to attend a university so the whole experience was foreign to me,” Santa Cruz, 24, said. “But I decided to turn it into how much I could learn about the whole thing.”

After trying photography and pre-med studies at Pima Community College in Tucson, Ariz., her hometown, Santa Cruz transferred to the University of Arizona and began studying journalism.

Santa Cruz received a call one afternoon that the university was going to announce its new president.

“It was cool to be in that room with all the other journalists hearing the big news,” said Santa Cruz, who rushed to the news conference in her waitressing uniform. “It was a total rush. I knew this is what I want.”

She apprenticed for the Arizona Daily Star covering education and was accepted as a Bolles Fellow assigned to cover the Arizona Legislature.

“I had to learn all about politics then, which I didn’t care much about before,” she said. “Now I love it and I follow it very closely.”

From there, she accepted an internship with The Oregonian in Portland.

“I had to report on a place I was totally unfamiliar with,” she said. “And the bureau I was in didn’t have a lot of breaking news happening — so if you wanted something to do you had to come up with it.”

Santa Cruz is getting ready for a move to Bend, Ore., for her next internship, with The Bulletin.

“I never imagined I would have been a journalist,” she said. “But now I can’t imagine doing anything else.”