My stepfather once told me, “ Everything happens for a reason, and you should let the pieces land where they fall.” Within those first moments of hearing that statement, it went straight through my left ear and out the other ear. I didn’t make amends for this vital advice he was trying to tell me. In the middle of July, he said to me that valuable statement. He brought this to my attention because I was stressing myself out about what I wanted to major in when I was going to attend Arizona State University in the Fall of 2023 since I had recently been admitted.

In my first semester of senior year, I was offered the opportunity to join the Journalism class by Arianna Bultsma (12th grade/ Editor in Chief). Still, I decided to turn down her offer since I wasn’t interested then. Then I was also in consistent contact with one of my mom’s old students (Keith Hall Jr.), who was attending Arizona State University then and supplied me with the information I needed to know about that school. Also, he told me the major he went in for was Sports Journalism at ASU. Which still didn’t give me any consideration about this whole Journalism situation. He mentioned that he could interview his classmates as he would cover stories for his classroom assignments. The information he told me about his major did start to light a bulb in my brain but then faded away because I couldn’t see myself doing it. As time passed, I still struggled to find a solution to what I wanted to major in before attending ASU. But the switch flipped on me when I was at home sick one day, doing nothing but trying to recover from my illness, so I attempted to give this Journalism thing a shot.

I got excited and told Keith Hall Jr./Arianna Bultsma how I was ready to try writing my first article and head into this journalism game. The next day approached, and I was, writing my first article about Santiago Sports bunched up into one paragraph. Within that paragraph, it was filled with many grammar errors, talking about the past/present at the same time, and just a lot of rookie mistakes. At first, I had no clue how to sufficiently write an article since I decided to turn down Arianna’s offer to join the journalism class with her; I couldn’t turn my shoulder to Keith since he was still doing his ASU work. So it was realistically me, and I was trying to figure out how to become a good enough writer. Til one day, I was blessed with having Connor McGill (ASU Graduate Now) viewing my TikTok profile. He was a senior at ASU who had tons of experience in journalism, from reporting professionally on camera to writing attention-reading articles online. I had an opportunity to hit him up via Instagram, and we were eventually able to hop on a couple of Zoom calls to talk about how I can sufficiently write articles. Soon enough, I was officially locked and loaded to put out my first article about sports featuring the Santiago XC team. 

On September 27, 2022, I debuted my first article {The XC Season Opener}, talking about the astonishing kickoff accomplishments that a couple of team members made happen. Then shortly a couple days after the publishment, I received a lot of positive/helpful feedback on my article, what made me more invested in this journalism field, and how this article became a trending source on the Shark Attack. This motivated me to continue writing as much as possible before I reached the point where I am right now. Throughout that time, I consistently continued to write about the Santiago XC team, then decided to step outside my sports talk zone and dim the light on the political/ racism overview. As more publishments came along the way, my articles consistently trended predominantly in the last few months of the first semester. Then within the second semester, I eventually started to write about various topics I had in mind. This officially leads me to the moment {of May 18, 2023} closing out my high school newspaper club writing era.

If there were one thing I could piece together about this puzzle and solve it, it would be that my stepfather’s statement from the beginning was incredibly worth hearing, and  I should’ve considered it from the start.  Now I can reflect on how it all played out smoothly and finally figure out that I’ll officially be majoring in journalism this fall at Arizona State University.