SuChin Pak
MTV News Correspondent
Since joining MTV News Team as a correspondent in May of 2001 SuChin has co-hosted MTV’s pre-Grammy show, and has covered the MTV Movie Awards, the Sundance Film Festival, and the MTV Video Music Awards. As a correspondent for MTV Daily News, she has interviewed TLC, Mariah Carey, Justin Timberlake, P. Diddy, George Lucas, Jane’s Addiction, Mary J. Blige, Billy Idol, and Fred Durst, just to mention a few. SuChin also nabbed an exclusive sit-down interview with pop queen Britney Spears for “All Eyes On…Britney Spears” in the fall of 2003.Beyond the world of entertainment, SuChin covered the aftermath of September 11th for MTV News, contributing segments on young people volunteering and Muslim American women. Most recently, SuChin’s MTV News series “My Life (Translated)” examines her experiences as a Korean-American and the lives of other first-generation Americans living their lives as “all-American kids,” but also trying to balance their American lifestyle with the customs and rules derived from their family’s backgrounds. In January 2005, SuChin traveled to Thailand to cover the aftermath of the tsunami; her powerful report was included in the MTV News special “After the Tsunami.” In September 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Suchin headed to Baton Rouge, LA, to watch college students at LSU work on land and in the water to aid rescue and recovery efforts. The experience was 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. Juggling school and television became a mainstay in SuChin’s life.
While attending the University of California at Berkeley as a political science major, SuChin was once again discovered, when the producer of a PBS Science show called “Newton’s Apple” saw a tape of her and called her in for an audition. She landed the job and became the youngest of five hosts of 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 five years old. She graduated with a degree in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.
