An outstanding student in the Journalism program at Holland College accepted an Atlantic Journalism Award during a reception in Charlottetown recently.

Maureen Coulter of Charlottetown, P.E.I., was selected by faculty for her outstanding work during the two-year program. The award comes with a $500 prize, a framed certificate of achievement and an invitation to the Atlantic Journalism Awards gala dinner and awards night in Halifax in May.

Her instructors describe Coulter as a mature and ambitious student and a top academic performer. Rick MacLean said early in the program, she developed a highly useful ability to look at her own work, and that of others, with a cool, professional detachment.

“She quickly established herself as a determined, self-disciplined and eager learner,” he said. “The growth of her own healthy, self-critical abilities allowed her to progress at a rapid rate.”

MacLean said Coulter accomplished that in spite of holding down more than one job. She worked in the service sector and freelanced for The Guardian newspaper, which hired her to cover events on nights and weekends following a month she spent there as an unpaid intern in her first year.

Coulter continued at The Guardian as an unpaid intern one or two days a week in the fall semester, finding a way to make it work despite holding down a part-time job to help pay her bills.

MacLean said when she had the opportunity to leave P.E.I. for her second internship to work for an Irving paper in N.B., she agreed, leaving home for a month.

“The Miramichi Leader was so thrilled they offered her a summer job.” She later accepted a position at the Northern Light, a weekly newspaper in Bathurst, N.B., making good on her vow to go wherever she could to find work, he said. Coulter graduates with her 16 classmates in Charlottetown in May.