Losing Home

I’m a New Zealander and I’m proud of it. Like really really proud of it. I love my country, I love my city and I have the fondest memories of growing up there. I’m also really lucky. I have a great family, grew up in a great environment where nothing was ever too hard or ever completely out of my reach. My parents made sure (almost) everything and anything was possible for my brother and I. So it makes sense that when I talk about home, I have nothing but the fondest recollections of my childhood.

But that’s the issue. All my knowledge comes from childhood. It’s my 21st birthday in 4 1/2 weeks time. That’s like real-person, real-world adult age. And I have no real idea what it means to be an adult in New Zealand.

For the last two, going on three years I’ve lived in America. Since graduating high school, the number of months I’ve spent in my own country doesn’t even tally to one year. By the time I return home, it will have been two years since I even returned for a visit, and three years since I ever “lived” there. Some of my closest friends will have graduated university by the time I get back. They will have completed a whole significant portion of their lives, and I will have missed all of it. Aside from the occasional (monthly at best) messenger catch up, and even rarer skype call, I have no real clue as to what that time was like for them; what it really feels like to go to University, to be a young adult in New Zealand.

And it’s freaking me the fuck out.

For someone who identifies herself as a Kiwi, who is horrified at the thought of someone confusing me for an American, attempting to wrap my head around the idea that I’m missing a significant portion of what this means is proving difficult.

I currently live with two German roommates. A few days ago we were chatting casually and they asked me something about life in New Zealand, about university life in New Zealand. Now, I know the basics. I was there working for the first eight months when all my friends started university and would meet them and was significantly involved in their lives and schedules. But since then, I don’t really know. I don’t know what it’s like to be a second or third year student there. What that workload is like. I know something about lectures, and something about tutorials and that’s all I got. So I had to look my German in the eye and tell her I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Her response? That’s sad.

And it hit me. Like the bus in Mean Girls that I never saw coming. I was Regina George, and I was blindsided by the feeling that my own country, my home was foreign to me.

Ever since then I’ve been grappling. Trying to straddle the pacific ocean and find the perfect, delicate balance between the country and culture I’m currently immersed in, and the country and culture I love and left behind. I’m extra sensitive to anyone confusing me with Americans (which this years new international students seem to do a lot), or with the loss of my accent. I’ve been wearing my All Blacks shirt proudly and have been talking about the Rugby World Cup with whoever will engage.

But I know it’s not the same.

I knew that coming to America for four years would be hard. I knew it meant missing out on things at home; Family holidays, weddings, funerals, birthdays. I always thought of it as an opportunity to experience a new culture. To broaden my horizons. I thought that having lived 18 years in New Zealand, I was ready to commit to moving away. What I didn’t account for was the four years in New Zealand I would lose.

When I thought about the things I would miss out on, I only saw them as individual events. Moments in time that I would miss, which was sad, but I was willing to sacrifice a few moments for the years of experience I would gain. What I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t just moments I gave up. It was years of experience too.

I knew I was starting I brand new chapter of my life coming here. Primary school was done. High School was done. I guess I forgot that while I was starting my new adventure abroad, my friends were starting a new adventure at home too. And this means things changing. They were experiencing new things too, things I hadn’t experienced. My knowledge of life in New Zealand is stunted. I don’t know how much rent costs. Or power, or water, or internet. I don’t know what it’s like to budget money weekly, and how much one can buy from the local New World with that.

When I lived in New Zealand it was a Utopic place. My parents paid for (almost) everything. My life was ordered. College (high school) was tough, but never unbearable. I still played college sport, I still paid student price to get into the movies and I spent just over a year being able to legally drink.

I don’t think I know what real-world New Zealand is like. I have ideas but no real experience. I know I have an amazing opportunity to be here, and I’m living a lot of people’s dreams. But it makes me feel a bit incomplete. I want to know my home country, all of it. I want to still be able to call it home.

Reflections

Welcome to holiday season in America. Here people go from stuffing themselves full of turkey to preparing to stuff stockings all in the span of less than 48 hours. Christmas music has been playing non-stop since the day after Thanksgiving, which means finals week is just around the corner, followed not long after by Christmas and then all of sudden we’ll be in 2015.

This time of year is all about reflections. Thanksgiving people spend time with family and friends and reflect on what they are thankful for that year. With the end of the semester, students are forced to reflect on their grades and are also confronted by teacher and class evaluations. Then comes Christmas, again a time to spend with family and friends, with the added bonus of presents. Finally, as the new year arrives, people reflect on how quickly 2014 went. They remember the highs and lows of the year and try to make resolutions for themselves, that they will without a doubt uphold during 2015. 

This is my final blog post for the semester, so I’m combining all of the above traditions to give you my reflections on being an international reporter.

I’ve found a common theme has run throughout my work this semester – both in blogs and newspaper stories. This has been the integration (or lack thereof) of the international community and the rest of the student body. As the international beat reporter, I feel I had the opportunity to bridge that gap. Part of my responsibility was figuring out what stories I should be writing and how could I make people care about these subject matters.

That’s something I find unrewarding as a reporter: You never really know who is reading your story, how many people and what the majority of them think about it. This can be difficult, particularly if you are writing about something controversial or sensitive. In my situation, I never knew if what I was writing was really reaching the majority of the student body. I knew most of the international students were reading my stories, but that only reaffirms the gap I was trying to bridge.

I love the international community at Allegheny. It is something I have come to be passionate about and therefore writing about it was never arduous, certainly never boring. Although this sounds like a good thing, I feel like I was constantly asking myself whether I was crossing ethical boundaries. I think that this semester I redefined some of these boundaries in order to fit my beat. This is something that I’m still not comfortable with. As a young journalist I want to check all the boxes and hold myself to excruciatingly high standards.

Having said this, I think that being in a constant ethical dilemma has been a great learning experience for myself as a journalist. I have definitely learned one or two things not to do and I feel a lot more comfortable about where ethical boundaries do and should lie. I think that by shifting some of these boundaries, I feel I am a lot more confident and comfortable about where they should be.

I really loved this semester and I would recommend that any future journalists in JOURN320 should consider taking on the international beat. It’s interesting and diverse and you will learn a lot.

 

Internationalization

What is Internationalization? As in international student and the beat reporter for international life at Allegheny, I’m still not entirely sure. What I do know is that we have an International Teaching Circle, that meets to discuss the idea of internationalization at Allegheny. How do I know this? I was recently invited to attend a meeting this Wednesday, where the committee invited some students who had participated in study abroad programs and some international students to attend. In total, four students attended the meeting, I was the only international representative.

Before the meeting, we were all emailed a list of focus questions for us to think about and offered the chance to go into the international office to prepare our answers if we liked. There was a set of questions for students who had studied abroad and a slightly altered set for international students like myself. Both sets centered around describing our experiences and focused on how we incorporated our experience into life at Allegheny.

I found that the most interesting question that came up during the discussion however, regarded the connection between the international community (both international and study abroad students) and the rest of the student body. This is something that I’ve encountered in my own personal experience but also in stories I’ve written about international students this year. Many of them have noted how wonderful the international community at Allegheny is, but mentioned how difficult it can be to get to know or to fit in with the domestic students (for lack of a better word).

It’s true. The international community is great. The international students we have this year act like one family. They support each other, attend each others events and do almost everything together. They are supported by the International Office and have nothing but praise for international life here. Where the struggle comes from is a lack of cross-pollination. If you go to an international hosted event, it is often rare to find a large number of domestic students in attendance. American students who live in the language houses, or take a language, or maybe who have studied abroad, are usually the only representatives of the main student body.

Take this week for example. This week is International Education Week and the International Office had organized events throughout the week to celebrate. One of these was a dodgeball tournament on Tuesday night which was organized with the help of the Student Athletic Advisory Committee. It’s aim was to bring the student-athlete and the international communities together. Talk to anyone and they will tell you that the event was great. However as well as trying to bring the two communities together, the event also reinforced the divide that I talked about earlier. If you looked carefully at the sidelines, you could see mostly international students talking to international students and student-athletes talking to student-athletes.

Now I know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. You can’t  put 60 people together for one hour and expect that everyone will leave there as lifelong best friends. However the seclusion of the two communities, however subconscious it may be, is something that Allegheny needs to be thinking about, particularly in any discussions about internationalization. It’s not just about sending students abroad, or bringing students here. There needs to be a thought process for how we help international students integrate themselves into the Allegheny student body as a whole.

I’m lucky. As a four-year student I get the best of both worlds, but it’s not as easy for the students who are only here for a year or six months…and it should be. Sure, these students will have made great international friends, and probably be able to travel around the world with a place to stay on every continent, but they came to America for a reason.  They have come all this way to experience college in America. To experience American life, food and make American friends. But often they struggle to integrate themselves in the domestic student body – which kind of defeats the purpose of them coming, doesn’t it?

Job Shadow

As part of an assignment for class this week I did a job shadow at The Meadville Tribune. The assignment was to pick a journalist, contact him and then follow him round for six to eight hours to get a sense of what a day in the life of a journalist is really like.

I shadowed Konstantine Fekos, for about five or six hours and although no breaking news stories came through in that time, I still found it extremely interesting and  beneficial. In the morning, Fekos attended a Veterans Day event and because I could not miss my morning class I was unfortunately unable to go. I was able, however, to meet him back at the Tribune and witness his creative process as he wrote the subsequent front-page story for the event.

I actually found this extremely fascinating, and I was lucky enough that Fekos worked to make this experience as interactive as possible for me. What I mean by this was he talked me through the event, how he had approached it, his completely full notepad that he brought back with him, and the angle he was going to take before he finally started working on the lead. The whole time he wrote, he made the effort to talk through all his thoughts and processes aloud so that I wasn’t just sitting there staring at a man typing.

This is what I found most interesting. Watching him rework sentences and listening to the thought processes behind every word, the logic of the story, where he put quotes in, why he chose those quotes, listening to him try to make the story flow effortlessly while maximizing the impact of every word. I know I have my own creative process, and often this actually entails reading my work aloud to myself, but I found it so interesting to watch how somebody else does it. How a professional journalist does it.

It opened my eyes to the creative process of journalism. I know that we learn about word efficiency and trying to say what we need to as precisely and objectively as possible but I now see journalistic writing through a new lens after this experience.

I have a new appreciation for the art of journalism, which I never really thought about before. I’m sure most people who have taken a high school English class will remember reading a poem and sitting there dumbfounded as their teacher stands in front of the class and explains the five different meanings and consequences of the authors word choices and word order. Now I love English, but even I remember rolling my eyes as my poor teachers tried to make me appreciate the consideration and effort behind one word or sentence that an author had said.

I understand more now. I appreciate English and now I have an appreciation for journalism: the crafting and care that goes into word selection and word order and how some words can change the entire objectivity of a story. For example, do you call someone a victim or a survivor? The word you choose can change the entire perception of this person. It is fascinating (well for me at least) to think about how much influence just one word can have. How much care journalists have to put into their work as they try to tell a story and write a great article but at the same time have an obligation to report the truth and remain objective. 

Overall I enjoyed my job shadow experience. Something about just being in the newsroom with crazy stacks of paper scattered all over desks in an organized chaos makes me think to myself – yes, this is an environment I could see myself working in. Which is exciting in itself. As an undecided major with no real plans for life after school, seeing an environment where I could actually see myself doing this is very exciting indeed.

“Whoops” – Making Mistakes

Draft. Reread. Edit. Read. Edit more. Read, reread, reread. Edit, edit, edit. Read. Have someone else read it. Drive yourself crazy as the words on the page become ingrained in your mind. You re-arrange a sentence three times. It ends up being one word different from what you started with. You start imagining commas where there shouldn’t be any. You get to the point where you have to force yourself away from the page because you’re no longer reading the words but reciting what you know is there. You see the words when you sleep at night. You hear them when you’re eating lunch.

You become your story. Your story becomes you. When it goes to print and you finally see it, immortalized in all its glory on the black-and-white pages, you breath a sigh of relief…even then it’s not perfect.

It’s usually not until the third or fourth time that I read my story in print that I’m finally happy with it. Never do I ever think I’ve reached the perfection I was striving for, but usually I reach a point of satisfaction and I can file the story away and move on.

Unless I made a mistake. Last week, I made a mistake.

A week later, it still haunts me. I still cringe at the thought of it. I’m in a state of permanent discomfort just writing this blog as I think about it over and over again. Too dramatic? Am I overreacting? Maybe. But I think if you ask any number of professional journalists if they ever made a mistake in a story, I would bet good money that if they ever did, they would still remember exactly what it was and how they felt.

I’m not talking about a grammatical mistake like missing a comma. Punctuation and grammar has never been my strength and it’s a skill I’m continuing to develop. Don’t get me wrong, it still jars me if I read a finished story and find a grammatical or stylistic mistake. But unless it’s a mistake I’ve made repeatedly, then I don’t usually lose sleep over it.

Last week I left out an entire country from my story.

Let me clarify. Last week I wrote an article for the new International page for The Campus. In it I explained where all the international students come from, why they are here and how they found Allegheny. One group of these students are the teaching assistants. There are six of them and last week I left one of them out of my article.

When Friday morning came I grabbed a copy of The Campus as soon as I could. Blissfully unaware, I sat down and read my story. I then super proudly advertised it to all the international students on Facebook. “Go look at the article about you guys,” I said. “Look you’re all famous,” I said. I didn’t even pick up that anything was wrong with it. The Spanish teaching assistant then contacted me, telling me I’d left Spain off the list of where the teaching assistants come from.

No? What? Don’t be silly? How could I forget a country?

But sure enough, I read through my story again and there it was. China, Germany, France, Brazil, Yemen but no Spain. It was heartbreaking. I was lucky enough to be able to email the editor of The Campus and have it immediately fixed on the online copy. So if you read the story online, Spain will be there. But any print edition, there’s still one teaching assistant missing.

As striving journalists we are taught to be meticulous. To pay attention to details. We know as humans that we are not perfect, but we aim to get as close as possible. I don’t know how many times I went through my notes to make sure that I had all the numbers right. I read through my story more times than I can count. I checked for flow and spelling and commas and punctuation. But somehow I still made a mistake. It was an honest mistake, completely unintentional but nonetheless I will never ever forget it. It was the first real time I ever stuffed up in an article and I really hope it was the last.

Owning up: The struggles of being a student journalist

Being a student journalist is hard: You have to be able to juggle classes, homework, friends, food, sleep, in my case a varsity sport and then, somehow, on top of all that, manage to find sources, put in the work to dig a little deeper on your story, organize time to schedule interviews and then write your stories – often in addition to the rest of your class work.

But being a student journalist is not that hard.

Confused yet? Let me explain.

Being a student journalist is hard…but it’s not the hardest thing you will ever have to cope with in your life. Yesterday in class we read an article about the shooting in Canada and I would recommend that everyone reads this article – it is one of the strongest pieces of writing I have ever read: You can’t help but be affected as you live through the entire event in the article.

Student journalism is not that kind of hard: we are not in a life or death situation, and we do not have to try and report on them. But it’s not easy and this week I will admit that it got the better of me.

Time management has never, ever, been my strong suit. I used to live by the philosophy that my best work was done only when I started it after 11 the night before: not the most efficient life motto but somehow I always managed to get away with it. Sure it led to some sleepless nights, scrambled early mornings and constant moments where I hated myself for leaving a project so late, but I always made it through…and on the rare occasion that I didn’t, the only person implicated was myself.

Journalism isn’t like that.  You can’t leave it to the last minute. In order to write an effective story, you can’t wait the day before deadline to begin contacting your sources. If you do, and are lucky enough to schedule an interview that day, you have absolutely no time to chase down any possible leads that may come from that source. And more so, it’s bad practice and unprofessional to email someone urgently, expecting them to make time for you in their day. You need to be organized and proactive. I will raise my hand and admit that this is something I still struggle with.

It’s not like an English class where if I hand in my essay late the only consequence is a drop in my grade. Or if I hand in a sub-par piece of writing I only have to worry about the professor reading it and  getting a lower grade. With journalism, if you don’t hand something in on time you’re letting down the rest of the paper and putting your editors in a horrible position. If you miss your deadline then your article won’t get printed. And if your article doesn’t get printed then your editors need to find something else to fill that real estate. You can’t hand in an article a day late and ask for all the papers from that day to be recalled so you can have them reprinted with your article in it: it doesn’t work like that.

…Hit your deadlines!

One of the four key aspects to being a successful journalist and this week I will admit that I missed my deadline. I am lucky that it was worked so that both articles I wrote this week made it to the website and into print. But this deserves no kudos on my behalf and instead I would like to thank the editors of The Campus for being so accommodating and working so hard to get all the articles out there and making sure they are the best articles they could be.

The usual schedule of a week should be as follows: Pitch a story Thursday, have a draft done for class on Tuesday at the latest and have the revised copy to your editor by that night at the latest, in order to allow for any final tweaks or edits. My final copies didn’t make it to the editors until Thursday afternoon/evening – the day the paper gets laid out and sent to print.

Being so late led to miscommunications, the wrong revisions of the articles being published and an immense fear that either:
a. my beautiful article I had worked  hard on would not be published, or
b. possibly the worse alternative that the original rough draft would be published and not my final, polished copy.

People talk abut cutting it fine, well I shredded this deadline and was just lucky that The Campus editors were obliging enough and willing to pick up the pieces.

I’m grateful this week – maybe the spirit of thanksgiving is creeping up on me, maybe its the effects of reading that article, but this week when I read my name in the byline I know I am lucky that it is there. As much as a grumble about how hard it is to be a student journalist, I know it’s not life or death hard.

 

International Problems

This week’s post is going to be about my beat. Not in some ‘links to greater journalistic ideas’ way but in a very specific, deals with a problem that is tied to the idea of trying to write an international beat. For the record, I’m not saying that you will only ever come across this problem if you write an international beat – everyday journalists probably encounter it as well, however, writing this beat means that I bump up against this with nearly every story.

What is this elusive problem that I’m rambling on about? It’s the issue of Language Barriers that I constantly get to battle against.

Covering all things international at Allegheny College – as I like to think my duty as an international reporter is – means that more often than not I’m interviewing international students themselves. Not always, as I try to spread my wings across the multiple facets of international life here, but so far it seems to have been more often than not…and for many of them, English is not their first language. Out of the 76 international students on campus at the moment, only five of them speak English as their first language.

Now I hope this does not surprise many – or any of you (however my personal experiences have shown me that not all Americans know this) but I am one of those five. Yes, although I may have an accent that makes you think I’m saying I’m better when I’m really asking for butter, my mother-tongue is in fact English. So the major language barrier isn’t a personal one; aside from the odd expression or common colloquialism here and there. Sometimes misunderstandings can arise from the fact someone can’t understand my accent, not from his inability to understand English. Most people learn either American or British English, so often a New Zealand accent can be really hard to understand. I suppose that’s an issue specific to myself but it’s a barrier nonetheless.

Whether it’s because of my accent, or a deficiency in their English ability, one of the biggest challenges I face is people not understanding my question the first time round. Sometimes this means rephrasing a question three or four times in order to be understood. Although this may not seem like a big deal and just a nuisance that I should just deal with, there is actually a deeper problem to it. As a journalist, you want to ask the right questions in order to get the right information that you want. And how people respond to a question can vary greatly depending on what word choices you make. Now if someone doesn’t understand my beautifully thought-out question the first time around, often by the third or fourth question what I’m asking can have changed dramatically. Am I usually getting the same basic information? yes. But it is the extra details or the answers hidden beneath the surface that can often end up getting lost.

Then there is the second half of the problem. Even when they are able to understand the question (be it on the first, third or fourth time), are they then able to answer it? Again, usually the answer for any basic information is yes. I don’t think I’ve had anyone who hasn’t been able to give me any kind of response – even if it wasn’t what I was looking for. Although they may be able to understand the question and then respond, I often feel like this is at the expense of eloquent wording and sometimes even general meaning. Had I been able to ask them in their first language and if they were able to respond, I’m sure that I would have pages full of beautiful quotes, color and details to really give my story body. But again, I feel like somewhere in the translation of what someone wants to say and how they then do that in English, the strength or direction of their point can get lost.

From a selfish perspective this can make it really hard to get good full quotes. Sometimes I can be left with half sentences and thoughts that have been strung together in a grammatically incorrect sentence. So then do I use these but not directly quote them? I feel like a whole story with no direct quotes loses some of its power.

More often than not I am able to get all the information I need, including a couple usable full quotes. I feel like I should put a disclaimer here to say that the English proficiency of most of the international students is actually very good. It is only when you really start paying attention to language and how different word choice and word order affects what someone is really saying, that I find I can sometimes have an issue. Sometimes language barriers can make it fun. Other times they can be extremely frustrating. More often than not they are never so bad that I can’t get what I need.

Keeping up Relationships

Relationships are the most important aspect to your beat. 

I think this is probably the most reiterated statement I’ve heard in Journalism 320 since the beginning of the semester and from various different outlets too. We’ve been lucky enough to have several professional journalists talk to us about the do’s and don’ts of beat reporting, and it would be remiss of me not to point out the repeated emphasis they all placed on developing and maintaining relationships within your beat.

Initially it seems like common sense right? If you are going to be repeatedly writing on the same circle of news, then it makes sense to have a good rapport with sources that you would consistently go back to, and other influential and important people. You need to have good relationships with your sources, and you need them to respect you.

Relationships, respect. Relationships, respect. Respect, relationships. 

I’ve learned the two are codependent. A relationship needs respect in order for it to be good but if you do not put the time and effort into your work and the relationship, then you cannot expect respect.

We were lucky enough to have lunch with Lisa Thompson, who works the Court beat at the Erie Times-News and one point (among many) she made stood out to me. She said that relationships are something that grow out of trust and time, however, they are still things that need to be worked on. She emphasized the importance of constantly being present on your beat, even when things aren’t happening. She says you can’t expect to show up and have people who know nothing about you give you what you need in order to write the story you want. This isn’t exactly rocket science but I feel like it’s a simple concept that could be so easily overlooked by story-hungry journalists.

I think the concept that is most difficult for aspiring (and possibly even professional) journalists -particularly myself, is finding that ever illusive line. The one that provides the boundary for the perfect balance where you have a good relationship, but they also respect you as a journalist.

What went hand in hand with this, was the ethical issues surrounding getting coffee or lunch with your source (Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics).

Do not ever let your source pay for your lunch is what we were taught. Do not let them buy you out…but then you have to ask, can your journalistic integrity really be bought for a simple cup of coffee?

During the past weeks, one of our assignments was to have coffee with someone who we determined was going to be a constant and important source for our beat. When it came time for my coffee date, I will admit that this was one of the times I doubted myself and whether this beat is a conflict of interest for me. I know the lines are blurry and with Allegheny being such a small school it’s near impossible to be completely detached from something. But at the same time I felt the small tight-rope I was already walking on begin to shrink and give way beneath my feet. Nevertheless, my belief in my ability to cover this beat well pulled me through.

Overall I think the coffee date was successful. I was able to establish a new dynamic to our previous relationship and create a fresh light for her to see me in: not as an international student whose forms she has to sign, but as an aspiring journalist, who is dedicated to covering international life at Allegheny, and covering it well at that.

This is not to say I didn’t bump up against some instances where I felt unsure or slightly uncomfortable, but I had to remind myself that: Yes I do want to portray International life at Allegheny in a positive way, but only when that is the case. If something negative does come up, I have a duty to myself as a journalist and to the Allegheny community to report it.

I know I need to work on developing this new aspect of my relationship and I think that will come with time. Professor Hatch assures me that if I do my job right, if I am thorough and report the truth, then respect will come.

 

Deep End?

It was my first, real official story. I’d gone to the meeting. Listened to the editors speak and voluntarily raised my hand to write about the Chinese Mid Autumn Moon Festival. I had no idea what that was and lucky for me one of the fellow journalism students in the room happened to be involved in the celebration, otherwise I would have had no idea where to start.

I had taken Journalism 100. I had learned about the ethics of journalism, about Associated Press style and how to effectively and professionally interview someone. I knew the theory behind writing a lead, the different kinds of leads you can write and the differences between a feature based story or a hard news one.

But I really had no idea how to be a journalist.

We had watched ‘All the Presidents Men’ and talked about the qualities we saw: determination, passion, curiosity, integrity. I knew the four key things you needed to do in order to be successful and I could write you a rote list of what qualities it takes to be a good journalist.

But I had never had to really apply them before.

Journalism 100 was great. It introduced me to the field, taught me the necessary basics and I felt supported the whole way through. If I didn’t know something, I could ask. There were always guidelines to follow and details to pay attention too; but when I came to write my first real story, there was no-one holding my hand.

That’s not too say that The Campus staff didn’t offer assistance at any time. If i needed real help, I knew I could have emailed someone. But as I said, I felt like I already knew the basics. I knew what I was supposed to do, I just needed to figure out how to take the notes I had written in class and apply them to real life situations. I had to figure out what kind of journalist I was going to be.

In the end, my first story wasn’t too challenging. My sources came together nicely and were easy to find but I still remember points throughout the whole process when I stepped back and thought – what on earth do I do here? How do I handle this situation? Or where do I go to next? And a lot of the questions I felt were common sense based, or so simple that I didn’t want to ask them. Some of them were probably just doubts that I had about myself.

I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. I feel like my learning curve is extremely steep and am confident that I will make mistakes along the way. But I also know those mistakes are probably going to be more important than the things I nail on the first time around.

I’m three stories down and still feel lost half the time, but I know I’m loving it and can’t wait to really establish what kind of journalist I am.