Michelle Fisher grew up in a Virginia household that was immersed in the news. Her mother was a radio host and her father was a T.V. broadcaster. She would follow them to their jobs and watch them work on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. They taught her the ins and outs of journalism.

Fisher was initially not sure broadcast journalism was her calling, but in the end, the tug of the family business was too strong. She is now an established, award-winning broadcaster at ABC7 in Los Angeles, and UCLA Extension played at least a small part in her journey. She treasures her time as a student and looks forward to inspiring others as a UCLA instructor beginning this fall.

“Journalism grows on you and it took some time before it did for me,” she said. “While I was told that I had the voice and look of a broadcaster, I didn’t see it at first.”

Despite her parents encouraging her to follow in their footsteps, Fisher resisted at first. She was determined to go to law school.

“I always kind of wanted to be a prosecutor. It’s what I was thinking of when applying to college,” she said. “I went to the University of Virginia and studied American studies and sociology. But around my third year, when I was close to graduating, I just kept thinking about the cost of law school and not only that, but just the responsibility of being a prosecuting attorney.”

She began contemplating other professions.

“I just remember watching T.V. with some of my roommates and thinking about what I wanted to do and I was like, ‘T.V. hosting, what does that look like?’” she said. “What does it look like to be Giuliana Rancic? She was one of the big names in T.V. broadcasting at the time.”

That summer, Fisher looked into the profession further and talked to her parents about their experiences. She completed a weekend-long T.V. hosting seminar in Los Angeles. And when she returned for her fourth year of college, she began plotting her move to California.

“When I told my parents that I wanted to somewhat follow in their footsteps and move to L.A., they were very supportive,” she said. “When they heard about it, I felt that they had a sense of pride and they were very happy to help me with anything I needed to achieve my goal.”

After Fisher arrived in Los Angeles, she worked several side jobs while trying to find her footing in the broadcasting industry. One of those jobs was as a waitress. And one day, she met a customer who struck up a revelatory conversation with her. She told him she was thinking of attending graduate school for journalism when he told her about UCLA Extension and how it offered a journalism certificate.

“That one interaction changed my life,” she said. “Wherever that man is, may his pillow always be cold. It was just a small comment from him, but it made me aware of the different paths I hadn’t considered.”

She researched UCLA Extension and enrolled in its Journalism Certificate Program.

“I think a big thing that’s attractive about UCLA Extension is that it's not this huge price tag that you see when trying to do a more traditional grad school program,” she said. “Classes were affordable. And for that price, I got great opportunities, teachers, access to internships as well as being able to complete things online from anywhere.”

The courses she took allowed her to sharpen her writing, production and interviewing. All the things she would need to do in her profession as a broadcast journalist were taught in great clarity and allowed Fisher to perfect the skills she already had as well as develop new ones.

“I can remember what it felt like entering UCLA Extension and the excitement and the hope that I had for my future career when I was in those classes,” she said. “It laid the foundation for my career prospects after.”

She finished the certificate program in 2015, and earned her first on-air broadcasting job in Louisiana shortly thereafter. Fisher has worked across the country including at CBS in Boston, NBC News Network in New York and at the Black News Channel, a startup network, before returning to Los Angeles in 2022 to work for ABC7, where she is a 5 p.m. weekday evening anchor and reporter. Today, she is a Peabody, Emmy and Golden Mike Award-winning journalist and a proud member of National Association of Black Journalists.

“I’ve been everywhere, and it led me back to where it all started,” she said. “I’ve been with ABC7 for about four years now and to this day I think that I never really found journalism, but that it found me. I love what I do and I’m glad I chose it.”

Fisher will teach her first UCLA Extension course this fall, The Practice of Journalism. Her time there as a student was instrumental in getting her to where she is now and she can think of no other place she would rather be than teaching others the skills she so happily acquired.

“I feel like in any industry, as professionals who have gotten to a certain level, you do have an unspoken responsibility to reach back and help those who are still coming out,” she said. “And while I am still developing the syllabus for my courses, I know that I will stop at nothing to be a great mentor to the journalists of tomorrow.”