One Decision Changes Everything

Staffer Reflects on overall gain of journalism experience

As I look back on my journalism years I see it all started in eighth grade when I was on the yearbook staff. I wanted to come into high school and do yearbook. I thought ‘Hey, it’s just going to be bigger than last year. No big deal.’ It was already too late to apply for yearbook, so I chose Journalism 1 as my alternative.

While in Journalism 1, I saw that my middle school yearbook and high school yearbook were two completely different things. They didn’t just put pictures on a page with pretty colors; no, they wrote stories, captions, designed pages, which just blew my mind. I was glad I hadn’t pursued the idea of being on staff.

Then as the year rolled around, Mrs. Berry was looking for new staffers for newspaper. Convincing my friends Nancy Torres and Noehlia Ortiz to do it with me, we applied for staff. We were accepted and now I have no regrets for taking the risk and applying.

Newspaper has been one of the best decisions of my life. It not only let me meet new people, but it provided me an outlet to express myself. I write stories and the words just flow on the page. I won’t deny it was always fun and easy but all the late days and stress were worth it when that first issue touched my hands. Seeing all our hard work finally in color and print is the greatest feeling in the world. It made the stories just become real and made me feel so accomplished.

This experience provided me with more confidence in my writing abilities and the opening of a new career choice for me, but also the meaning of deadlines, procrastination and teamwork. I never thought of newspaper as long-term, but these last three years opened my eyes to new possibilities. That doesn’t mean I’ll go into journalism (well who knows maybe I will), but it showed me the skills needed for the real world.