SuChin Pak
Biography
SuChin Pak joined MTV News as a correspondent in May 2001. Since joining the team, she has co-hosted MTV's pre-Grammy show and has covered the MTV Video Music Awards, MTV Movie Awards and the Sundance Film Festival. As a correspondent for MTV Daily News, she has interviewed Mariah Carey, Justin Timberlake, P. Diddy, George Lucas, Jane's Addiction, Mary J. Blige, Billy Idol, Fred Durst and TLC, just to name a few. SuChin also nabbed an exclusive sit-down interview with pop queen Britney Spears for "All Eyes on Britney Spears" in fall 2003.
Beyond the world of entertainment, SuChin was an integral part of MTV's 2004 Choose or Lose campaign, which sought to get 20 million young people to vote. She covered the September 11th aftermath for MTV News, contributing segments on young people volunteering and Muslim-American women. SuChin's recent MTV News series "My Life (Translated)" examined her experiences as a Korean-American, in addition to the lives of other "all-American kids" trying to balance their American lifestyles with the customs derived from their family's origins. In January 2005 SuChin traveled to Thailand to cover the aftermath of the tsunami; her powerful report was included in "MTV News Presents: After the Tsunami." In September 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Suchin headed to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to watch college students at LSU work on land and in the water to aid rescue and recovery efforts. Those experiences were chronicled in "MTV News Presents: After the Storm."
SuChin never planned on a career in television. Television came looking for her. During high school, while volunteering for Youth in Government, an organization aimed at involving and educating young people in the political process, SuChin was interviewed for the news by KGO-TV, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco. The program director for the station happened to see the piece and approached her to host "Straight Talk 'N Teens," a new magazine-format teen show covering everything from entertainment to topical issues such as teen pregnancy and drug abuse. This "after-school job" became SuChin's introduction to the entertainment world. Her first big interview for the show was Ice-T. The ability to juggle school and television became a mainstay in SuChin's life.
While attending the University of California, Berkeley, as a political science major, SuChin was once again discovered when the producer of a PBS science program called "Newton's Apple" saw a tape of her and called her in for an audition. She landed the job, became the youngest of five hosts on the show and spent her college years lugging her textbooks on shoots to locations as remote as Tahiti.
Following graduation she was approached by ZDTV (now called Tech TV), a 24-hour national cable network devoted to technology and the Internet, for which she was hired as a reporter for a show called "Internet Tonight." After a year with ZDTV, she was recruited to be a correspondent on another teen show called "First Cut" on KRON, the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. It had become increasingly clear that television was her calling, and looking to move on from San Francisco, SuChin sent in a tape to the start-up cable network Oxygen. After a year-long audition process, she was hired as a host for "Trackers" and moved to New York. From there, MTV spotted her and came calling.
Born in Korea, SuChin and her family moved to the Bay Area when she was 5 years old. She graduated with a degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
