Entrada Alumni - Chandra Lochan

A track scholarship temporarily diverted Chandra Lochan onto the wrong college course, but persistent prayer (and a timely email) got her running in the right direction — and into a career in television.

The Trinidad-born Lochan attended Calvin’s Entrada Scholars Program in the summer of 1997, but she chose to study at Michigan State University (MSU) on an athletic scholarship instead. At MSU, athletic demands collided with academic pressures. “I was majoring in biology, and my grades were terrible because I participated in track. I knew I needed to make a change, and I didn’t know what. So I prayed about it forever — the whole second year.”

An unexpected email from an Entrada friend spurred the disenchanted track star to confide her college woes. Soon after, Lochan made the switch to Calvin, swapping biology for political science as a major.

“When I got to Calvin, it was nice to see some familiar faces from Entrada — and automatically be introduced to everybody else through those people I knew,” she remembers. In her second semester at her new school, Lochan participated in the Paul B. Henry Semester in Washington, where she interned on the show America’s Most Wanted.

Lochan made unexpected career strides as a television intern. Working initially with the city’s law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, on legal issues for the show, she soon branched out into script writing. (She even earned a one-time spot in front of the camera, anchoring a news spot.) Her D.C. experience ended with a job offer on the show.

These days Lochan works as executive assistant to the executive producer at America’s Most Wanted, and she looks for opportunities to make an impact — like responding to the families of murder victims. “I try to write a letter of comfort and really feel like I’m making a difference. There’s a lot of sad stuff that goes on around here, and you can’t help everybody. But for the people you can help, I feel really good about that.”

Ever enterprising, Lochan hopes to make the move into producing, ponders attending law school, and envisions working on a political debate show some day. She remembers her early trepidation when she left MSU for Calvin: “I thought, ‘I’ve prayed about it a lot. God isn’t going to take me here to drop me off and leave me.’”