Mangiaracina ’05 Living His Dream in TV Weather

 

“That was the very first weather-related thing that I remember; my first weather story,” he says. “I thought it was so cool.”

Not long after that, he received a book on weather from his grandfather and, in 8th grade, wrote a term paper on the difference between hurricanes and tornadoes. While there wasn’t much about meteorology in the Prep curriculum (“except learning that Mr. Fitzpatrick had a son who was a meteorologist”), his love never subsided. At Penn State, Mangiaracina took Intro to Meteorology as a gen ed science class, which changed the whole focus of his coursework and career goals. “I really did well and I liked the teacher, who used to be on the Weather Channel, and I changed majors to meteorology,” Mangiaracina says. “At times, I felt like I made the wrong decision. It’s a ton of math, a ton of calculus, but I am glad that I stuck with it. If I had gone a different route, I would have been mad at myself.”

His specific course of study was Weather Communications and Forecasting and he did on-air work at Penn State, in the largest student-run TV weather station in the country. A professor saw his talent and encouraged him to pursue a career in TV news. After graduation, he earned a spot at an ABC affiliate in Sioux City, Iowa, where he stayed for three years. “Our tri-state area was Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota,” he remembers. “At the time, it was market 147, so it was a good starting spot and I ended up working Monday through Friday, which was great.”

He then moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he spent two years at an NBC/Fox station in the nation’s 56th largest market, before getting the chance to fulfill a dream: moving home to Philadelphia for a job on CBS Philly. “It was always a goal to work in Philly,” he says. “It’s home for me, and it’s market 4, so there is not much higher you can get. I always thought it would be really cool to be on air in my hometown.”

Mangiaracina, who goes by the last name Peterson professionally, remembers watching a young Adam Joseph when he started in Philadelphia during Matt’s senior year of high school. “He was a younger guy who had made it into a big market, and I remember thinking it would be cool to be him someday; to follow a similar career trajectory as him.”

Thinking back to his Prep days, Mangiaracina is grateful for the opportunity to expand his comfort zone. “Coming from a suburban area where everyone looked like me and was from a similar economic class, it was great meeting new people and growing through some very formative years,” he says. “It gave me the chance to come into contact with people from different ethnicities and different socio-economic means. Going to the Prep helped me learn how to be around people who were different from me. I’m glad that I didn’t have to wait until I was in college to do that. It was a great opportunity to learn about other people.”

He also appreciated the freedom he had at the Prep. “I had a long commute during my four years, which taught me time management,” says Mangiaracina, who used to travel to the Prep from Newtown. “It was also the way that the Prep approaches its education. We were given latitude to learn how to make decisions.”

Mangiaracina has kept a large group of Prep friends. “My friends from the Prep are still the guys that I have regular communication with every day,” he says. “The best man in my wedding was Alex Fornal ’05, and we met as sophomores in Ms. Primick’s Latin class. Mike Sciblo ’05 was a groomsman. There is a group of 11 or 12 of us who have stayed good friends. Judging from what I’ve heard, I don’t think that is unusual among Prep grads. The friendships that we make there are carried on 15 to 20 years down the road. I don’t know that other schools have that.”

Mangiaracina’s Prep connection has carried on through to today. He has spoken frequently to the Prep summer program students as well as the WSJP Student Broadcasting Club. Last weekend, he and his wife Korie Lown got married in the Church of the Gesu.