Coming in as a new student speaking a totally different language, not knowing anyone, one who had never done journalism in his life, I was frightened. Walking into this empty room on the first day not expecting anything much from it, just a regular class where the teacher lectures and the students complete assignments. 

The room was filling in with people, new faces, faces I had seen the hour before and even faces who seemed familiar but probably weren’t. The bell rang. The teacher stood up telling us to write our first article about anything we wanted. I was frightened. I had never written an article before and if I had it was in another language: Italian. 

Choosing a topic was the hardest task to complete; I had no idea what to write about. I finally decided–with help of the Editor-In-Chief–to write an article about the phone policies. I had no idea where to start writing it: finding a title? Writing a deck head?

 I was, again, frightened.

 I tried to pull it off by researching how to write one and finally submitted it three days later. Even though I wasn’t picked to be published, this gave me the confidence to write more and more articles. 

The second article I started writing was that very second week of school. I wanted to challenge myself to write something I would need to dig deeper into to have a well-written article. To accomplish this, I had to talk to students and faculty in the school, interviewing them and making sure I had all the information I needed. The feeling when I finished that article was a feeling I’ll never forget. I wasn’t frightened. For the first time in this class I had a feeling of accomplishment, that I had done something right. 

I had realized at that moment that my focus was not on the class as a whole but on the papers and articles I was writing. I didn’t want to miss out on having a friendly bond with the class the only year I could have done so. I didn’t know how to do it, just go over and talk, make jokes? 

I was frightened once again. 

I finally got the courage to speak to some of these people and found out that they are very passionate about what they do. They write articles to try to convey meaning and truth to the reader. I wanted to learn from them how the passion was being transmitted through their articles. After a lot of learning and a lot of articles written, I had finally learned that when the writing comes straight from your heart it can show compassion. To someone who is interested in going into journalism, I would recommend not just connecting with the articles you are assigned to write, but also the people that are around you.