Less than a month after the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, about fifteen minutes away from my high school, city leaders met to discuss gun violence prevention measures and answer questions from the public.

It's hard to be in a room full of angry people when you too, are angry; I was angry at the city leaders for acting after a shooting instead of preventing it and angry for my peers who graduated from Annunciation school but were so desensitized they were making jokes about the shooting.

​But I also recognized it is part of my journalistic duty to remove myself from the conflict and interviewed leaders from both sides of the aisle. I learned about the different roles community members play in service of others and what their largest concerns were. I also worked on a time-sensitive article and photo gallery set for Zephyrus for the first time, publishing both pieces a few hours after the town hall ended.

The air was cold and wet and full of laughter the day I covered the Pumpkin Smash & Bash. This was the weekend before we sent to print on Monday, and we needed a quick news story to fill empty space on a page. I scoured the city calendar for something interesting and was quickly intrigued by the event. 

I connected with city officials, firefighters, volunteers, and out-of-town visitors while becoming immersed in my local community. I was impressed by the city's organization of a family-fun event to address this issue and proud of my own abilities to write about it in a couple hours.

I also learned that the pumpkins in my front yard after Halloween posed an environmental concern and understood that this was why it was my role to share this kind of information with the public.

While wandering campus at the Medill-Northwestern Journalism Institute, I began to notice multiple broken and rusty bikes. Many had spiderwebs (which freaked me out) and most had bright purple "Notice of Violation" tags. The tags seemed fresher than the bikes, so I began to look into them by asking staff in the parking office, calling the communications company and finally getting in contact with Northwestern's sustainability program.

The camp also had a no wheels rule, so when I learned of the local bike shop that students could donate bikes to, I trekked over 30 minutes into Downtown Evanston with my friend to speak with a manager about the issue.

This article taught me how to establish my own contacts with administrative leaders in a new environment and cold call people to land interviews. I also realized how it important it is to be observant, because any small things you notice can be a full story. My favorite part was gaining experience pitching articles and learning what it is like to go through the editing process to be published in The Daily Northwestern.

I covered the Edina Car Show with a growing fever under the boiling end-of-summer Minnesota sun. It was my first real attempt at same-day local reporting in Minnesota, and I learned quickly that journalism does not wait for comfort. Despite the heat and exhaustion, I moved from car to car speaking with Rotary members, small business owners from 50th & France, and local artists practicing their technique using cars as models.

What struck me most was how something as simple as a car show can serve as a crossroads for generations. Older Rotary members spoke about service as legacy; younger creatives described honing their craft and building business networks. Through these conversations, I gained a deeper understanding of Edina’s civic and entrepreneurial ecosystem and learned that community stories often live in places that look ordinary at first glance.

Sitting in a tiny lobby chair at the Veterans Service Building, waiting to interview Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, I felt the weight of what I had managed to secure. The conversation that followed — and another interview with former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter — became one of my most formative reporting experiences.

As someone deeply interested in artificial intelligence, writing for our special "Election Edition" allowed me to explore AI’s role in democracy. I prepared extensively, crafting layered questions that bridged technology, law, and ethics. 

I learned how to hold conversations with high-profile sources confidently and how to translate complex policy discussions into accessible language for student readers. More importantly, I began to see how AI’s implications stretch far beyond education and into the foundational structures of civic life.

This article began with casual hallway conversations about classmates pursuing aviation. Recognizing a trend, I partnered with a younger writer to report on it. 

The piece became highly quote-driven, weaving together individual student journeys into a collective portrait of ambition.

Mentoring during this process taught me how to collaborate while still guiding structure and voice. I struggled to encourage the writer to reach out to more people and compromise on our timelines to write. If I could go back, I would work more to include her in my process. 

After publication, peers told me the article sparked new interest in aviation among readers. That feedback reinforced journalism’s power to shape conversations and influence aspirations.

One of my earliest collaborative projects, this article examines student caffeine consumption from academic, athletic, and health perspectives. I wrote the sections on academic and athletic impacts and conducted the interview that anchored our lede.

Researching sleep science and interviewing teacher Katelyn Strauss forced me to reflect on my own caffeine habits. I'm the kind of student who only drinks one small energy drink a day, but will fall asleep in class if I don't. In this way, my work on this project revealed to me that my journalistic work can shape myself as much as it shapes others. Still, it was important for me to maintain objectivity and not indulge too much in my own curiousity.

I also experimented with alternate story forms to present data in engaging ways. Through this piece, I learned how to balance anecdotal storytelling with research and how collaborative writing requires both confidence in your ideas and openness to others’.

I'm a firm believer that you don't need to know anything about sports to write a good sports story. This experience proved me a little wrong.

Originally pitched to our athletic boosters club, this longer-form piece followed a rebuilding girls’ tennis team with few returning players. Rather than defaulting to typical camaraderie narratives, I focused on growth, leadership transitions, and the discipline required to rebuild.

However, to fully capture the dynamics of the team, I spent a lot of time following up with players and coaches to comprehend the structure and nature of tennis, especially when considering Minnesotan rivalries.

By this point, I was comfortable writing athlete features — but this story pushed me to find a unique narrative hook paired with an experimental video embed. I learned how to refresh familiar sports structures and elevate them beyond score summaries.

Reporting on a loss requires a different kind of sensitivity. After the girls’ hockey team fell in a double-overtime championship rematch, I attended a press conference where a teary-eyed player — who was also one of our writers — spoke alone.

I chose to sacrifice immediate publication and instead waited several days before conducting longer, more emotional phone interviews. Because I had live-tweeted the game, readers already knew the play-by-play. This allowed me to prioritize relationships and depth over speed. I learned when timeliness matters, and when empathy matters more.

This was also my first experience live-tweeting a game and I struggled throughout the state tournament series to balance accuracy, speed, and my little understanding of the sport. Yet, by the end of the state final, I could knew all the girls' names by their numbers and the hockey terms I needed to know.