Pathways

Today was a good day in higher education. Nancy will always be my favorite professor. She cares about students and believes in each of them regardless of how good they are at any one particular skill.

Anyway, I asked her when I could meet with her so we could talk about the class I'm taking from her, what I can do with a journalism degree, et cetera. She said she'd love to treat me to lunch and we could chat. I politely refused her lunch offer. She insisted.

We're going to lunch next week. Ha ha.

But, her interest in my life, my thoughts, and spending time enough with me to get to really know me was so astounding. I want to be a professor or a teacher so badly, because I think I could be that professor that cared about the students, that was an effective instructor, and that helped inspire people to do new and exciting things with their lives, just like she has.

College would be a lot different if every professor was like Nancy. Sadly, that's not the case, but at least I've got her to make my tuition dollars worth it.

I wrote this last semester for the Reporting class I was taking with Nancy. I reread it today and really liked it. I liked it partly because I thought I worked the words in a particularly excellent way, but also because it was a pretty revealing self portrait that I wasn't even fully aware of at the time.


My Path

It was first grade and Mrs. Eddy asked us to draw our future selves doing what we wanted to do when we grew up. I don’t know how a seven year old got the idea of a newspaper reporter, but ever since then journalism has been at the forefront of my mind. What seven year old Zac saw was a blend of high profile private investigating and exciting story telling. Not that those aren’t elements of journalism, but as twenty year old Zac, I see a very different series of things.

I see a changing world. I see the things I love, like the complexity of nature; architecture and design; photography and art; people; the automobile industry; and yearn to see and learn more about those. I also see things I greatly dislike, such as politics, catastrophes, accidents, unrest, and I want to shut them out. But as I think of journalism and how this world is evolving, I think of how they combine, the good and the bad, to bring meaning and purpose to our lives. Journalism is the element that enables the masses to bring the great moving-picture of this world into focus. The focused images help shape the world and the people that it is made of. I am a product of the journalism that brings forth the information that rapidly and constantly changes here on earth. I entrenched myself in that world a long time ago, and want to lend a hand in presenting the facts and figures to the world. I want to be a part of what is going on, big or small.

It was fifth grade and Mrs. Berry and Officer Ray were teaching the D.A.R.E. program. We were being quizzed on current events and I loved it. It was my time to shine. I watched the Today Show every morning instead of Spongebob Squarepants (not that I didn’t indulge in Spongebob on occasion). I knew who Donald Rumsfeld was before most of my classmates knew why there were different political parties. Knowing about a lot of different things was just what I did naturally.

News and information have always been what I love. Processing all of this stuff and filing it away for no particular reason is just what I have done for as long as I can remember.  I never made a conscious choice to pursue journalism until I was a freshman in college. I don’t know how the idea got there, but I see why it stayed. Seven year old Zac saw the opportunity to have an exciting life, and I still see that. But what I really see is a world of great possibility and want to make that my life.