After a few years working as a college journalist, you start to become jaded.

Every day you take to your campus or community with a notebook and pen (or possibly tape recorder) and spend hours talking and researching and writing, and most of the time, it nearly always results in a $10 paycheck, and a pat on the back.

The costs, however, are most vile. Your social life diminishes, your studies become much more difficult, and you feel tired all the time unless you're on drugs (Red Bull and espresso included). And most of the time, you are subjected to criticism that's generally justified half of the time. Long hours are spent lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering if you really are as worthless as people tell you.

And granted, there's extremely little that is worthy about college journalism; its like its own genre of journalism really, the one only the geeks and every so often important people pay attention to.

I look back on the long "paper roads" I've left behind me: some make me smile, others make me shake my head in disgust. For this website, I have written personal reflections on these ten stories, each one meaning something to me, leaving some sort of effect that I actually care to share with readers.