When Saira Anwer arrived at the University of Illinois after graduating from Galesburg High School in 2008, she had a vague notion she might follow her father — the doctor at Cottage Hospital — into medicine. That plan lasted about as long as it took her to discover her broadcast journalism classes.

She had grown up watching WQAD before school and the six o'clock news every evening. Something about the people on the other side of the camera had always pulled at her. The journalism classes made it feel possible. The pre-med requirements quietly faded away.

What didn't fade was the economy. She graduated in 2012 into a market that still hadn't recovered from the financial crisis. When Teach for America accepted her and offered a placement in Dallas, the calculation was simple: it was that or go home. She took it, earned her teaching license, and spent two years teaching eighth-grade language arts and reading — classes where half her students were limited English proficient, which is also where her Spanish minor from the University of Illinois proved its worth. Her Spanish background from Galesburg High School was strong enough that she had skipped the introductory college courses entirely.

The classroom years shaped her in ways she didn't fully understand at the time. Standing in front of middle schoolers every day — students who are constitutionally incapable of pretending a teacher is cool — stripped away what remained of any public-speaking anxiety. "No one will make you feel less cool than a classroom full of eighth graders," she said. "So if I could do that every day, I could speak in front of an audience of adults, easily."

After two years, she dusted off her college broadcasting reel and sent it to roughly a hundred stations. A call came back from Minot, North Dakota — an anchor position, zero experience required. She bought the appropriate winter clothing and went. From Minot, she moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where she spent three years as a weekend anchor before her agent sent out a new reel. The same day, a call came from Miami.

She assumed it was a mismatch. She was from small-town Illinois. The Miami stereotype felt nothing like her. But she did the interview. And then the interview shifted into Spanish. "That was what stuck out to them on my resume," she said. A month later, they hired her.

She has been in South Florida since 2019, working as a reporter for a station that, she says, invests in news the way she hadn't seen elsewhere. The market delivers: hurricanes, celebrity cases, international stories involving Cuba and Venezuela, and all the political energy of Mar-a-Lago just up the coast. She covered the indictments and convictions from the bridge connecting West Palm Beach to Palm Beach — a lot of live shots from that bridge. She was working at 2:00 am when the Surfside condominium tower collapsed and was among the first journalists dispatched to the scene.

"It's the greatest news market in the country," she said.

She speaks candidly about where the industry is headed. National networks are cutting staff; trust in national news is eroding. She's watched colleagues cover Miami stories and Surfside and Venezuela from afar and felt they missed the point. "I speak to Venezuelans all the time about how they feel about Maduro and these controversies — and I feel like national coverage a lot of the time misses the mark." Her instinct is that local news is where credibility currently lives, and she intends to stay in it.

When she thinks about Galesburg, she thinks about what she didn't know she had. In one football season at Galesburg High School, she was center snare of the drum line, captain of the Gadets, and on the tennis team. She was the class president. She had her hands in everything simultaneously — and the school let her, encouraged her, made space for all of it. It wasn't until she got to college and heard her classmates' stories that she realized most places didn't work that way.

Growing up as one of only a handful of Muslim families in Galesburg — her family Pakistani, her parents practicing their faith in a community where almost nobody shared it — could have been isolating, especially in the years after September 11th, when she was in sixth grade at Churchill Middle School. Instead, her teachers asked thoughtful questions about her culture and her faith. Classmates were curious rather than judgmental. "There were never any adults that made me feel uncomfortable being who I am, in again, a dark time like that," she said.

Her older sister, Amna — class of 2006, Academic Hall of Fame, went on to Northwestern — preceded her through those same hallways. For years, every teacher Saira met already knew the family name. The comparison was a lot to live up to. "I feel like it's turned a little bit," Saira said, with characteristic understatement, from her perch on the Mar-a-Lago bridge.

Today, Saira and her husband — a British fintech professor she met in South Florida — are raising their daughter, who just turned one, in Miami. Her parents relocated to Paducah when Cottage Hospital's fortunes declined around 2010; her sister works in sustainability at Washington University in St. Louis. The family is scattered now, as families tend to be, but the foundation was built in one place.

Saira still hasn't made it back to meet Judy of Judy's Pancakes — though she intends to. When Craig mentioned that Galesburg's most-talked-about personality right now is an Asian American woman who arrived broke as a single mother in 2017 and built a TikTok empire, Saira lit up. "I would have never in a million years predicted that the most famous person in my town would be an Asian American," she said. "That is so cool."

That's Galesburg. Full of things you didn't see coming, that turn out to be exactly right.