This is what Point Park University student Zeena Hamid did over the summer: dodge mortar fire, wade into bitter ethnic strife and worry her poor mother sick.

In fact, the 28-year-old Iraqi has spent the past year covering the war ravaging her country, working as translator and reporter-in-training for the Los Angeles Times.

She is just days into her graduate studies in journalism at Point Park, but she already has been through the kind of death-taunting, real-world training that most of her peers will never know.

And she has paid a price for pursuing a livelihood that breaks with long-held traditions about the role of Muslim women in her country.

"You are breaking my heart," her mother tells her.

Journalism also got in the way of three marriage proposals.

"You chose your life. You made your decision. You chose your career over your love life," her five sisters, married and with kids, tell her angrily.

Ms. Hamid flashes an impish smile, the same one that would play across her face when she was a little girl and she would steal her brother's bike and ride it at night.

Her family and friends can beg her to stop reporting on car bombings and exploding buildings all they want. She is hooked. She loves being a war correspondent.

"It is risky but exciting," she said. "I just love it."

So it feels a bit like the world is going in slow motion now that she has left the chaos of Baghdad to come to the United States this fall to read books about mass communication as a Fulbright Scholar at Point Park.

"From Baghdad to Pittsburgh, it's weird. No car bombings," she said. "No street blasts."

With her orange sneakers and pink cell phone, which is constantly ringing, the young woman blends into the students milling through the hallway. She speaks English well, but when her phone rings, she often breaks into Arabic.

Many Pittsburghers are nice, but she says sometimes a student will cut a conversation short when they find out she is from Iraq. "They talk about Muslims being terrorists. Every time they say this, I want to stand on my feet and say, 'Muslims are not terrorists. They are just like you.' "

She is living with an Iraqi family in Greenfield until she gets her own apartment. There is no more waking up in the night to the sound of shooting or helicopters -- blasts so startling she would sometimes fall from her bed onto the floor.

She is pained by the carnage of her country, having lost a friend in a blast just two weeks ago. She thinks Iraqis, not Americans, should decide the fate of her country.

But she discovered her calling of being a war correspondent -- ferreting out the truth in the middle of chaos.

Her closest call came this spring when she was doing an interview in the Parliament building in the Green Zone, or International Zone, and about 10 minutes after she walked out the building, she heard a loud explosion. Unbeknownst to Ms. Hamid, it was a bomb that went off in the Parliament, killing eight.

She walked onto the street and called up messages her colleagues left on her cell phone, which she had to turn off in the Parliament. "Are you alive?" "Are you OK, Zeena?" "What is happening?"

She still is incredulous that a suicide bomber was able to get through security of the highly fortified Parliament building.

Even as a little girl growing up in the Shiite town of Wassit, Iraq, two hours south of Baghdad, she always wanted to plunge ahead -- and not worry about the danger.

The sixth of 10 children, she moved to Baghdad in 2002 to attend Mustansiriya University, where she got a master's in modern English poetry. She then worked on state reconstruction projects for Mercy Corps.

She left Baghdad in 2004 because it was too dangerous to travel home to Wassit because of violence by Sunni extremists. "They asked people to go off the course, and they just slayed them one by one," she said. "It was terrible."

She returned to Baghdad -- and just fell into journalism when a friend, who was leaving Iraq to study journalism in America, suggested she fill her vacancy with the Los Angeles Times a year ago.

But her relatives did not give her points for her gutsiness.

"It is hard for a girl to leave her birth town and live somewhere else just to work. She can work in her birth town. People say, 'Why doesn't she get married and settle down?' "

In fact, one boss asked her where her family was and whether they knew what she was doing.

"You have no right to ask me that," she told him.

"He was trying to find out if I have a family to back me up or not. If a girl does what she wants, it means her family kind of lets her go because they cannot control her."

But she is still extremely close to her family -- even though her career choice drives them to distraction.

Ms. Hamid had a close-up window of the way U.S. newspapers reported on the Iraqi war. She was impressed by some reporters, especially Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times. "He is great. He's the most courageous and adventurous, and he keeps the office moving very fast."

But she thinks some other U.S. reporters distort the facts to conform with President Bush's politics and some soldiers are just there for the paycheck. "There are good Americans, but I don't think they think of what the Iraqis want. They think of what George Bush wants."

In her journalism classes, she is quiet and observes -- and hasn't yet offered her insights of the war. But she says she would like to write about her war experiences for a U.S. publication.

She likes the personal freedom in America, the fact that she can dress any way she wants and not have to wear a head covering.

She plans to get her master's degree and then return to the Mideast to become a foreign correspondent.

Her family keeps telling her to take a different path.

"Zeena," her father tells her, "You are spoiling your life. You don't feel it now."

"Don't worry about me," she tells her father and everyone else who shakes a head at her.

"I am fine."