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Hello! My name is Drayaden (Draya) Raby, I am a senior Journalism and Creative Writing student at Central Michigan University. I am currently completing a Bachelor of Applied Arts, expecting to graduate in August of 2025. During my high school career, I participated in an Early College program where I earned an associate's degree in arts from Mott Community College in May of 2023.
Reading and writing have always interested me more than anything and from a young age I knew I wanted my career to involve writing. As I have grown and gained a range of life experiences, it is clear to me that sharing meaningful stories is what I am meant to do.
The journalism program at CMU has instilled a strong interest in multimedia reporting and visual storytelling. I hope to carry that interest into my future career as much as I can. My creative writing interest has also flourished at CMU and recently I have fallen in love with poetry as a form of storytelling and of emotional release and exploration.
My journalism portfolio contains numerous assignments done for journalism courses as well as links to my published stories from my summer internship with WCMU Public Media in 2024. This internship thrust me into the world of daily news and audio reporting, I learned a lot from this experience but more than anything I learned about the type of stories I feel most passionate about covering. The audio experience I gained was one of my favorite aspects of the internship and I would love to pursue that more in my career.
Why I chose this topic
Why I chose this topic
During my time at CMU, I have developed a love for volunteering. First, through the Alternative Breaks Friday Break experiences, these are volunteer opportunities lasting roughly three hours on Fridays and are the free-to-participate option within the Alternative Breaks program. One of these volunteer experiences introduced me to the Humane Animal Treatment Society which was by far my favorite experience and inspired me to become a regular volunteer for the shelter. Since September of 2024 I have been volunteering weekly in their feline department, doing feline socialization and giving the cats a chance to interact with someone and be let out of their bay for a while.
Being involved with the shelter has opened my eyes to numerous issues relating to domesticated animals and aspects of animal shelters that I would not otherwise have had. The more I volunteered with the shelter the more I fell in love with cats and became increasingly passionate about the issues I now knew about.
With this capstone project, I knew I wanted to report on something I was both excited and truly passionate about-- fostering was an easy choice for me.
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