When I was a child, I saw superheroes everywhere I went. While running errands or getting lunch with my Mom or Grandma, I’d people-watch and create stories about the lives of anyone walking by. An intense phone call indicated secret hero activities; a nice dress told me someone was a princess. 

 

In middle school, I used this creativity and love for storytelling as a means to write, creating stories about how characters changed the world. My protagonists were kind, clever, and always perfect. I didn’t quite understand it yet, but this perfection made my stories lack depth and realism. 

 

When I joined my school’s newsmagazine, I was chosen to write a story about my school’s dual enrollment dance class. I struggled to not embellish the actions of the dancers, afraid that straightforward writing would be unentertaining. However, as I conducted interviews, I connected with the dancers in the class. They explained the impact of being able to learn their art at a college level, and they felt represented by my coverage of the class. These protagonists’ stories weren’t perfect – they encountered issues throughout the “simple” process of enrolling in the class, something to scoff at in comparison to how easily my fictitious characters saved the world. However, I realized the impact of real stories: they make people feel represented.

 

While sometimes, this representation resulted in ridicule (when I wrote a satirical opinion about PDA, I was called lonely), I stopped caring when I realized just how much my work could help people. After a story I wrote about period poverty was published, a girl told me that it helped her find free menstrual resources. Overjoyed, I began to search out people’s struggles in my community and attempt to share them and solve them – again, and again, and again.

 

When I was chosen to be my publication’s coverage editor, I wanted to broadly change the way my newsmagazine approached writing to highlight more people. I began to reform our beat system, prioritizing a wide range of coverage across the school and assigning people to write briefs based on the information we learned. 

 

After becoming the co-editor-in-chief of my school newspaper, I began to gather information perpetually, not just because of my inclination to journalism but also so that I could lead. While managing a staff of sixty people, it’s easy to reprimand those who have failed to meet deadlines or produce lower-quality work. However, my greatest strength as a leader is truly getting to know my staff before taking any action — what motivates them, but more importantly, the reason behind their struggle. It’s a cliche, but I’ve learned that gathering information is essential because you never really know what someone is going through.

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In this time period, I also realized that while written journalism is essential for the upkeep of knowledge and democracy in our society, people losing their attention spans does not mean we should give up on journalism. It means we need to get ahead of the curve, creating interactive graphics and videos that are both knowledgeable and interesting. Thus, I began to prioritize design, multimedia, and website production, both learning these areas myself and teaching others.

 

My years of scholastic journalism have taught me that I don’t always have to have a love of a topic, but I do have to have a love of telling the truth.  Next year, as a journalism major, I hope to tell these truths on a larger scale and solve issues in whatever community I end up in. 

 

Most importantly, I know I will represent real-life superheroes and highlight the imperfections that make all of us human.