How a passion of documenting the moment lead to reporting reality
It is 1:47 in the a.m., and like many fellow students, I am stuck in the predicament of hammering out an assignment the night before it’s due. In this case, the assignment is this article, and coming up for content, as tired and sick as one can be, is an uphill battle. However sub-optimal these conditions may be, it’s part of the life of a student aspiring to become someone who can make a bachelor’s in journalism work.
The purpose of this journey in my life is to accomplish a couple of things: 1) to complete the academic requirements to attain a bachelor’s degree, and 2) to figure out what I would be doing after completing those requirements. This thinking is the result of years and years of pressure from my traditionalist Asian parents; the need to finish my education and find a career to start in. This always hasn’t been my drive to finish, hobbies and passions once led me down this path, both of which I hope to spark again once quarantine is over.
Other factors that have started me down this road include a series of events that have influenced my, then, young self to consider journalism. Back in high school, around 2013, my AP World History class took a field trip to see one of the former Foreign Ministers of Great Britain speak at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library speak. Me being me at the time, I asked my teacher if I could bring my camera along to take photos, just out of posterity, never thinking it could develop past any run-of-the-mill tourism-style photos. Thanks to a photojournalist also covering the scene, and encouraging me to get out of my seat to get better angles, I started to catch the itch for event photography.
This prompted me to get ever more engaged in photography, jumping into roles such as “Band Historian”, being my high school’s student band photographer for my junior and senior years (2014–2016). Being around so many of my friends and being passionate about music and photos, I never went anywhere at the time without a camera, catching so many of the best moments usually never seen by anyone who wasn’t with the program 24/7, but also seeing so much of the humanity and emotions experienced by those who are also driven by their passions.
I became a highly visible person during those times, despite the camouflage, and would even jump further into visibility when I took my photography skills to yearbook. Serving alternatively in my sophomore (2013) and senior (2016) years, it was then I was further introduced to the concept of marrying both photos and writing together, as we had to build our assigned pages with these aspects in mind. Photos, captions, even a paragraph or so describing who and what’s on the page. The arts of design had been hammered into me without my full realization, only seeing it at the time as an objective to be completed for a grade in the class. This InDesign experience, combined with further practice on several pages in the yearbook, would help me greatly once I got into community college.
From 2016 to 2020, a year or so longer than intended due to situations beyond my control, I made the decision to try for an Associates in Arts of Journalism at Moorpark College. This was a time where, in addition to finishing out my general education credits, I learned the skills needed for the field, which took the basics of what I knew (photography and writing), and applied them into understandable formats for mass communications. Naturally, with my journalism classes, I also partook in the student paper, starting out as a writer in Fall 2016, learning to go out to events and people, and gathering what I noted from said events and people like interviews, b-roll, and everything in between, to put them into a story format.
The reporting role quickly developed into a tree of branched out skills, as I learned when inheriting the Student Life section editor role the following semester in the Spring of 2017. I then learned how to look at stories submitted to me, and check for grammar/spelling/AP errors, make some suggestions, and send them back to the writer. In a process that would usually take a couple of back-and-forths until all parties were in agreement that the piece was sound, and sent up the chain. At the same time, however, I was introduced to several more skills under the umbrella of broadcast for the paper’s “Newsroom Minute”, where the resident broadcast editor at the time taught me how to edit videos using Premiere Pro and Audition. That would lead me to inherit his editing role in the future.
Going onward from that, spanning 2017–2020, I would be shuffled around in many roles. Student Life editor, Broadcast editor, dropping out for a semester, and then coming back to the technical and advisory role of an “associate editor”, over the course of those couple of years. At the time, I thought it was a great experience, to be able to accrue so much experience in different aspects of the paper, ranging from writing, from broadcast to podcast, and even learning how to design and manage web pages. Those years have taught me many skills and how I can utilize them for a potential future career. One can see my vast portfolio with that organization here.
Which brings us to now, nearing the conclusion of this article, also realizing that in describing those experiences overall, I never alluded to the writer himself in personal detail! A few quick things of note: I love my food, some would even call me a foodie. I have worked for four years, one month, and 21 days with the grocery store chain known as Vons. I’ve been playing Pokemon GO, on and off, since its inception back in July 2016. Furthermore, I’m very much of the gamer variety, building and owning a custom rig worth quite a few dollars, as well as a couple of generations of PlayStation consoles.
I hope you, the reader, have learned as much about me and my journey through the road of becoming a potential journalist, as well as some added tidbits that came to mind. I leave you with a most recent picture of myself, as current as Spring 2019.
