About Me
My interest in journalism started a long time before I had ever heard about the Muse, the Marquee, or even Dreyfoos school of the Arts. It started when I was about 7 years old with my grandfather. Every year I would spend my summers in New York with my grandparents, and every day of those summers the soft thump of my grandfather's New York Times being delivered disrupted the morning quiet of the house. Driven in part by curiosity and in part by the occasionally less than enthralling environment of my grandparents house I began to look through the paper with my grandfather. Though I mostly stuck to the simple colorful comics at the start, which held much more interest for my 7 year old self than stories of stock market fluctuations and NSA overreach, I eventually moved on to the more serious stories and was fascinated. The stories about thrilling events in faraway places carried out by real life heroes were only made all the more riveting to me with the knowledge that it was all true.
This kicked off a passion for journalism in me that hasn’t faded since. By the time I was eight I was asking for newspaper subscriptions for christmas. By the time I was nine I had started a collection of antique newspapers that stretched back to the civil war. And by 10 I had my heart set on the communications program at Bak Middle School of the Arts. Bak was where I had the first opportunity to work on a publication, but it was also where I encountered my first challenges with it. I had my first (unpleasant) encounters with deadlines, unresponsive sources, and the sometimes tedious editing process. In the end, however, I learned to navigate the process of producing a publication, and at the end of that year I got to experience for the first time the pride in seeing all my hard work paid off in a publication that the whole school enjoyed.
This pride stuck with me, and motivated me to take on more responsibilities, eventually leading me to become the Editor-in-Chief of my school's yearbook. I was thrilled, and was all set to produce the best yearbook the world had ever seen when the COVID-19 pandemic swept in and upended the entire playing field. Suddenly I found myself leading a staff that was half online half in person and tasked with the seemingly impossible mission of covering a student body when we were strictly forbidden from coming within six feet of each other. Still, we managed to buckle down and craft whole new systems for communication, interviews, editing, design, and all the other things that it takes to make a yearbook. Ultimately our staff managed to overcome the many many challenges of that year and produce a book that stood as a testament to a year like no other.
It was these experiences that motivated me to come to high school with a reputation for it's journalism programs. At Dreyfoos I was able to explore and develop my skills in what has now become my favorite form of journalism, photo journalism. The ability to capture moments with true meaning, the highs and lows and most emotional parts of life, is an incredible ability, and I love that every day I get the opportunity to do that. Mind you, at first the moments I captured tended to be dark, grainy, blurry, out of focus moments, but over the course of this year, with the help and guidance of the more experienced photographers on staff, I've been able to grow to the point where I am now the photo editor on both our award winning yearbook and award winning newspaper. Looking into the future I'm so excited to get to continue to try and expand my abilities. I've looked through past books and gotten new ideas to try, underwater photos of swimmers, drone shots of pep rallies. Some of them will come out dark, grainy, blurry, and out of focus, but even then, I know I can take that experience and keep trying.