Ashley Linder knows she shouldn’t be here. At 21, she should be toiling away at a small market radio station cutting promotional commercials, dumping callers and bringing breakfast to older, more experienced superiors. That’s the route most people take when they first try to break into the radio industry.

Instead, she spends her days in Silver Spring, Md., perched over road maps and taking calls from motorists in an attempt to decipher the day’s traffic patterns for WTOP in the ninth largest radio market in the country. Or giving traffic updates and tips on NBC4 in the nation’s eighth ranked television market. She will even admit that the idea of someone her age with her experience following 30-year WTOP traffic veteran Bob Marbourg was "unthinkable" a few years ago. She can still recall her first broadcast at the station.

"I can remember very first time I was on [WTOP] I couldn’t breathe," said Linder with a laugh. "People told me to calm down and I need to take a deep breath or I would sound terrible."

THOUGH LINDER can be seen and heard on prominent radio and TV stations, she technically works for Metro Networks, a national broadcasting outsourcing company that provides reporters to radio and television affiliates across the country. Jim Russ, director of operations at Metro Networks, said Linder has a voice and feel for the medium that can’t be taught.

"It’s not easy to be entertaining in traffic and at the same time pass on information that people can use," said Russ.

Of course, Linder, who has worked for Metro Networks for over a year, wasn’t always as interested in the ebb and flow of the Beltway as she is today.

"In all honesty I didn’t want to grow up and be a traffic reporter," she said. "It just so happened that there was a [traffic] position open."

After months on the job, Linder said she became "obsessed" with identifying movement on major roadways, finding work zones that could potentially delay traffic and absorbing each beltway exit because "there’s always a traffic pattern." Now she can’t help thinking about it even when she’s off the clock.

"I came to see it as something so useful and integral in this area to know. Why wouldn’t anyone want to know about it?" she asked.

Having lived her whole life in Springfield and the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, Linder can draw on a lifetime of personal experience when she’s piecing together her traffic updates for the day.

"She grew up here, so she knows the area," said WTOP editor Rahul Bahli. "For a new traffic reporter, it’s always helpful that you’re from here."

A 2005 GRADUATE of West Springfield High School, Linder was on the yearbook staff, the cheerleading team, the theater program and student government. Assistant principal Richard Griffin called Linder "a tremendous personality" during her time in school.

"She was a very outgoing and at a young age she just conducted herself like a young professional lady," said Griffin. "She was outgoing but she was a quiet person too, if that makes sense."

Though Linder is young, it does not necessarily make her inexperienced.

She attended Christopher Newport University in Hampton Roads, Va. for a year before dropping out to attend the Columbia School of Broadcasting in Fairfax. As a student, she landed an internship at WJFK with the Sports Junkies, the station’s flagship show. She spent her days doing research, getting coffee and absorbing as many details about her first encounter with a major market radio station and timeslot. Separate from her internship, Linder began working full time as for Discovery Channel Communications as a media librarian.

"You certainly did the grunt work but you got to see the sales aspect and see what happened with every angle of a show," said Linder.

AFTER HER sixth-month internship was over, Linder stayed at WJFK for another year and half, cutting commercials, doing promotional work and other odd jobs before being hired by Metro Networks in 2007. In 2008, she was promoted to the full-time overnight slot at WTOP. Linder said she has worked hard to get where she is, but that she’s still grateful for her early success, something her superiors say is not common.

"Young people have got to understand when they get in this business that they can’t expect to be making a lot of money right out of the shift and they can’t expect to be working the 9-5 slot. That’s just the way it is right now," said Russ.

Russ said that Linder’s age didn’t bother him in the slightest when Metro Networks hired her.

"If anything, it plays into her benefit because she has always been very diligent about learning what she needed to learn, handling whatever shift she needed to handle," he said.

Balhi concurred.

"She’s dealing with the same challenges that everybody else has to whether you’re young or old," he said. "There’s not much to fall back on if you’re young. It’s really her work that people are judging."

Linder said that aside from some good natured-ribbing from her mostly older peers, her age has mostly served a positive force of motivation.

"Most of the time I just laugh it off and try to step it up that much more because I want everybody to regard me as an equal," she said.