University Daily Kansan editor in chief Kelly Stroda, a senior from Salina, is pictured Tuesday, July 19, 2011, in the newsroom.

One day in February Kelly Stroda tramped over a snow-packed parking lot to get to her car. She carried food, blankets and a pillow just in case she got stuck.

It was the second day in a row for blizzardlike conditions to assault Lawrence. At 11 a.m. as temperatures had tumbled into the teens, the forecast called for 35-mph winds and up to a foot of snow by the end of the night.

The message was clear: Stay home. And yet, with little visibility and flecks of snow clouding her windshield, Stroda inched toward campus.

School had been canceled. But school or no school, The Kansan had to go to press. Stroda was one of five people who braved the conditions to put out the next day’s newspaper.

“It was like I was going on a camping trip,” said Stroda, who hunkered in the newsroom for nearly 16 hours until she finally headed home. “That’s one of my favorite experiences, and I just love the paper we put out the next day — even though no one saw it because there was another snow day.”

Stroda, of Salina, is fall editor for this year’s Kansan. When the appointment was announced, no one seemed surprised.

“Long before she was named editor, we identified her as someone who would be editor some day,” said Malcolm Gibson, KU journalism professor and general manager of the University Daily Kansan. “Given her three dedicated years to the Kansan, she had proven herself.”

Stroda has been a part of the Kansan since she walked onto campus three years ago. She served as a reporter and led a large staff as managing editor last spring. With high school journalism experience in her favor, Stroda was named design chief. She designed the Kansan twice weekly, as well as supervised two other designers. Then she became a health and science reporter, writing on a range of topics: insects, pollen counts, herbal remedies, chocolate.

That same year, she participated in a program called Bridging the Gap: A Military Experience for Journalists, where she spent the last week of September switching back and forth as an embedded reporter at both Fort Leavenworth and Fort Leonard Wood. She watched privates fire machine guns, shoot at digital targets, listen to lectures, eat MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) and perform morning exercises before dawn. At the end of each day, she blogged about it. The experience forced her to examine a world previously unknown to her.

Seeing things from another person’s eyes is an activity that helps fuel Stroda’s passion for journalism. And this intense passion for the craft is one reason Stroda won the Roy W. Howard National Collegiate Reporting competition last April. Gibson wrote a letter detailing why Stroda was a clear choice.

“She dedicates herself to what she’s doing and she puts her full effort into it all the time,” Gibson said. “She’s someone who’s never disappointed.”

As one of nine winners in the contest, Stroda got to travel to Japan for an intensive guided trip of several cities, including Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima, in 14 days. Stroda says the experience was surreal and enlightening.

When Stroda got back to Kansas at the first of July, she didn’t have much time to rest. This summer she interned at the Kansas City Business Journal. Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 6 p.m. she reports on niche business topics and writes stories for the web and longer feature articles.

On Friday and Saturday nights, she slides her MacBook Pro into her blue backpack, shuttles to Java Break and hunches over her laptop to do homework and write articles. She blasts Pandora into a pair of ear buds, toggling between a myriad of stations — Lady Gaga, jazz, country — depending on her mood. And she obsessively checks a thesaurus before deciding on a verb. Her friends say she studies too much.

“On Friday nights I would joke that I have a hot date with a thesaurus,” Stroda said. 

Stroda takes pride in her writing. Last year, she wrote a four-part series on students who had lost a parent while in college. The package was titled “Tragedy in transition: When death interrupts college.”

Bloggers from Media Matters, USA Today and The New York Times’ Motherlode wrote pieces lauding it. The experience is just one highlight in a young career already filled with highlights.

It looks like that date with the thesaurus has turned into a long-term relationship.