Ernest R. Sotomayor began his career at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism as director of career services in February 2005 after a long career as an editor and reporter. He oversees a five-person career counseling offices that advises graduate students in their intern and full-time job searches. Under his leadership, the school hosts recruiting visits by more than 50 companies, conducts an annual job fair and arranges exclusive internship programs locally and abroad with CNN, ABC News, Axel Springer AG, Grupo Clarin, Columbia Journalism Review, Associated Press, Huffington Post, Poetry Foundation, Reuters and others. Additionally, Sotomayor serves as an adjunct professor in Digital Media Newsroom. Sotomayor began his career as a City Hall and enterprise reporter at the El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post in 1976, and in 1979 joined the Dallas Times Herald, where he worked as an enterprise reporter and an editor on the local and state news desks. At the now defunct Herald, he managed a yearlong project in 1987 covering the immigration amnesty program, which won numerous top awards, including the SDX-SPJ’s National Gold Medal for Public Service. He joined New York Newsday in 1989 and was Brooklyn/Queens Editor. He later served as Newsday’s Long Island regional editor, deputy business editor and Long Island editor for Newsday.com. He was part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editing staffs that covered the New York City subway crash in 1991 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996. A 1977 graduate of the University of Arizona with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, Sotomayor served as president of UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc., and presided over its third national convention in August 2004 in Washington, the largest journalists convention ever held with 8,300 attendees. In 1986, he was co-director of the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at UC Berkeley for the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

As part of his Punch Sulzberger training, he is overseeing expansion of the Journalism School’s Continuing Education programs, which include non-credit courses for working professionals on skills ranging from investigative reporting to social media and multimedia storytelling. In Fall 2011, he launched nine professional development courses, and in spring 2012 there were 12, including groundbreaking online/distance learning courses in each term.