Growing up in Silverdale, she was the girl with the camera.
“I always had a camera in my hand,” says Stella Sun (’18 Comm.), who knew by middle school that she wanted to pursue broadcast journalism.
When it came time for college, “WSU was the only school I applied to.” The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University “was a natural fit.”
So was her chosen field. Sun moved quickly through TV stations in Missoula, Montana, then Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona, finally landing her dream job before turning 30 at her top destination: home.
“It’s awesome working for the station I watched as a kid,” says Sun, who returned to the Seattle area just over a year ago as a meteorologist and reporter for the KOMO Morning News team.
Since September 2024, she’s been covering weekend weather, plus general assignment news Monday through Wednesday. The 2024 holiday season marked her first Thanksgiving and Christmas home in seven years.
“I always wanted to come back and be with my family,” says Sun, the middle of three sisters. Their parents—immigrants from South Korea—now live in the South Sound. “My sisters send me photos of my parents watching me on TV, and it’s awesome. This is my dream, to work in the market that I grew up in and that my parents live in.”
Sun took her first broadcast classes at Central Kitsap High School, where she anchored a student news program and worked on the student newspaper. She also served as historian for the associated student body and presented weekly announcements.
“I’m very extroverted,” says Sun, who joined an improv club as an outlet for her outgoing personality. “I enjoyed acting and thinking on my feet. I love meeting people. I love talking to people.”
At WSU, she was a member of Chi Omega sorority and worked as a Cougar Connector, leading campus tours for prospective students. She also interned at KHQ in Spokane and got involved with Cable 8 in myriad roles—from promotions director to sports reporter and as an actress on a show.
Advanced Television News, taught by Marvin Marcelo and former WSU professor Trent Boulter, was a favorite class. “We produced our own shows, made our own packages, and went out and conducted interviews and found stories,” Sun says. “It just solidified that I wanted to go into journalism.”
She landed a job straight out of Murrow as a reporter at KTMF in Missoula, which “needed fill-ins for everything and threw me into weather. I realized I wanted to learn the science to better explain what was going on.”
A year later, Sun enrolled in an online meteorology program at Mississippi State University while working full time. “I basically focused on work and school and didn’t have a personal life,” says Sun, who finished the certificate in late 2023.
By then, she had completed two years as a reporter and weekend morning forecaster at KOAT, where Albuquerque Journal readers voted her “Best Reporter” in 2022. In 2023, while working as a traffic anchor, reporter, and meteorologist at KPNX in Phoenix, she was part of a team that won a Rocky Mountain Southwest Emmy Award for “Best Morning Newscast.”
Working in the Southwest fulfilled her ambition to be in a Top 50 market. Albuquerque-Santa Fe ranks 48. Phoenix is 11. “I was 27 when I made it to Phoenix, which is very young. But it’s the age my mom was when she was moving to a different country and learning a new language.”
Today, her mom sells Korean skincare products, and her dad manages property. “They’ve always supported me,” Sun says. “It feels amazing to me that, as their kid, I’m reporting the news and talking about the weather to an American audience.”
Asian journalists—female Asian journalists, in particular—are underrepresented in TV newsrooms around the country. A 2024 study by the Asian American Journalists Association found that more than 70 percent of TV stations don’t have enough on-air staff to be representative of Asian American and Pacific Islander populations in their market and that one in four have no Asian American women on air.
Luckily, Sun had a role model in the Seattle-Tacoma market. She was inspired watching former KOMO reporter and longtime KING anchor Lori Matsukawa, a now-retired Japanese American journalist. Now, Sun hopes other extroverted girls—girls who maybe also like to carry around cameras and ask a lot of questions—might see her on TV and aspire to launching their own broadcast careers.
“It was a fast climb,” Sun says. “And I’m very grateful for it. Chasing a career was great but it was also lonely. I missed my family. My dream is home.”