Hoover Grad Lands Dream Job as Automotive Journalist

Not a lot of people can say they’ve landed their dream job.

And even fewer can say they landed it straight out of college.

But ’06 grad Jacob Brown is just one of the lucky ones, we guess.

The son of Marshall and Denise of North Canton, Brown, 24, now is an automotive journalist. More specifically, he’s an associate editor with the new online publication automotive.com and now lives in Rodondo Beach, near Los Angeles, California.

Brown graduated in 2011 from the University of Pittsburgh with degrees in business and English non-fiction writing. And, a few days after beginning an internship, was offered his dream job.

Brown remembers the whirlwind experience of packing up and leaving his home for the new job and having only a week to do it. It was just him, what belongings he could manage to fit in his "misfiring, oil-burning" Saturn and a 2,500-mile road trip.

“I had two suitcases of clothes and my computer that I put in a laundry basket, some pots and pans and a sleeping bag and a couple pillows …,” he recalled. “My car was as filled as I could get it while still being able to see out of it.”

He admits he's still got loads of belongings stacked piled into his parents' garage, but he's definitely settling in to his new home and his position at Motor Trend Magazine.

To put it simply, Brown travels around the world and drives new cars. Not bad, right?

“I review cars. I take home a car and I check it out and I write about it,” he said. “It’s been pretty fun. I can’t say I can complain about getting to drive a bunch of cool cars and check out various cities. Basically it’s what I’ve been doing since the age of 4 and now I’m getting paid for it.”

So far his job has taken him to Chicago, Texas and South Korea, just to name a few places. He’s even helped with Motor Trend’s Annual Car of the Year Award.

Brown said some of the most challenging parts of his job are handling the long days (he had just worked 13 and a half hours the day before the North Canton Patch interview), sifting through press releases and managing day-to-day administrative work.

“There’s not always fun to it,” he said. “There’ a lot of writing, a lot of paperwork, a lot of filing and basically deciphering information and stuff you just kind of have to plow through in able to get to the fun stuff. Very few people get to see that part of the job.”

About his hometown of North Canton, Brown says it was a great place to grow up and get a good education. But it always seemed to Brown that the city neglects those who aren’t “the cream of the crop.”

The city should have more activities and avenues for those young people who aren’t wrapped up in sports, academic clubs and other school organizations, he said.

“I feel like for young people in North Canton there’s a lot of potential if you’re always involved in something,” he said. “If you’re not, it’s a place that kind of breeds complacency and then all of a sudden , where a bored kid breaks into someone’s house and tries to steal drugs.”

For North Canton students, Brown offered this advice for success: “Find the right people, contact the right people and never lose sight of what you want to do in your life.”

Interested in reading Brown’s automotive blog? You can find it here.

Know of anyone who might make an interesting feature story as part of this "Where are they now?" series? Send North Canton Patch Editor Morgan Day an email at Morgan.Day@patch.com. (Think about Hoover High graduates who might have left the city to pursue interesting careers, just like Jacob Brown.)