Boy, what a year it has been for me. Not just because of the various things and events and instances that occurred in school that I endured and enjoyed, but also because the experiences I had in my 4th period Journalism class, a class that had been revived in 2016-2017 school year, literally, from the dead after being shelved from the other school electives – though strangely it was still on the course selection sheet even during its absence on ERHS campus.

As I watched my counselor punch in Journalism on my class schedule for Junior year, I thought to myself: I’m going to be part of a new legacy and restart something that would grow to new heights by the time I’m gone. This thing called journalism, more specifically high school journalism, and the likes of which ERHS hasn’t experienced in a long time. I was going to be at the heart of it.

And now as the year comes to a close, I look back on those moments when I sat at my desk with the school’s laptop near the end of the week, typing away the stories for the Roosevelt Review (a solid name for a school newspaper, in my professional opinion) that some students would soon read. I’ve written from a variety of areas, from school news to arts & entertainment, world news and features, and of course this one feature reflection piece. Some stories I’m quite proud of, some I could have done better on, and some I just wrote at the last minute to get a story in for a grade, the feeling afterwards a bit mixed.

I reminisce on the interviews I’ve done with some people on campus, the incredible people I’ve met and the social benefits in such interviews that would later be used to write my stories. Those notes I took were deemed very unreadable by the end of those chit-chats. Good thing I brought my voice recorder every interview.

Of course, I can’t forget about the editing process, which was a bit different for our class because me and my classmates edited each other’s articles instead of a main top editor-in-chief like in actual publishing news. But it was during those times in which I learned the most in digesting the writing styles of my other fellow staff writers to improve my own.

But it’s the people that I think about the most: my fellow staff writers with whom I’ve talk to not just about journalism, but about life. I will miss the Senior staff writers for sure.

At the end of it all, I’m just so glad to be continuing Journalism next year when I’m a senior because journalism is about, in the words of famed reporter of the Watergate scandal, “illuminating what is real.” And I feel that it is my duty to give my student body not just the news that appeals to them, but also news that they need to know, even if it’s not what they like. One year ends, and the final one begins.