Final Banner Blog
Well, it has been quite the madness for the last month. Seems like school never let up, always throwing something new at me. Which is why this poor neglected puppy got and remained that way. I don’t think that without these assingments for the Banner that this poor blog would ever see anything posted on it at all! It certainly was a tough semester, particularly working in the journalism program. It was not something I had anticipated doing at all, but nevertheless turned out to be pretty rewarding. Even though I have always considered myself something of a writer, it was always within the context of fiction. The idea of writing for a newspaper was new to me, and not necessarily something I was looking forward to.
But it certainly taught me much more than I was expecting. It taught me the importance of going outside of your areas of interest and experiencing writing about new topics. One of the most enjoyable articles I wrote this semester was the profile on Professor Renfro, who taught my Honors seminar in Russian Literature. It was a new experience to me, meeting someone who had grown up in what had been the Soviet Union, and who had experienced so much in her life. I felt very honored when she chose to share some of her life with me, particularly during our interview when she told me a story about how a Soviet journalist had twisted things that she had said in order to make a political point. The necessity, nay the sanctitiy of my job as a recorder of someone elses experiences was really impressed upon me in that interview.
As for writing in the future, I think I’m done with journalism. Even though it has been a wonderful, if occasionally challenging experience, I just am not cut out for this kind of thing. It is not my temprament to write like that. But I will always thank this course for reinvigorating my interest in writing and I have planned to write a novel length story this summer and hopefully try and get it published when I return from Air Assault school at the end of May. While I am kind of scared of what it would take to finish all that, my experience in this class and the feeling of seeing my name attached to something real and concrete that was published and read by others as something authoritative was very powerful and has given me a lot of motivation to continue writing and to see my work improve to the point where it can be published.
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