by Luke Hillmer
I was recently assigned to write my first story for the student newspaper, about the air conditioning systems on campus. My first few steps were to send out some quick emails to administrators and conduct a quick informal poll of about one hundred students to see how theirs were functioning. And then I waited. No one responded. I had to break the bad news to me editor. I had nothing.
After getting an extension, I sprang into action with a confident tone and a handy dandy smartphone I conducted, I went to the Dean of housing and recorded a perfectly decent interview and a lead to a new source. I also ran around on campus to get all the answers I needed from students, the ones I didn’t get while taking the lazy route, running the poll. I quickly learned that with enough courage and confidence, I could get more information in a single afternoon than I could in a full week of being shy.
I’d often heard my professor talk about the importance of shoe-leather reporting. But I finally understood what she’d meant all that time. I was emboldened by that experience to start taking a different approach in other aspects of my life, including on future stories. I’d spent too much of my life being passive and waiting for things to happen. I wanted to be bolder.
Sixteen Days Later
It was the month of October. I had already completed the story about the air conditioning, but it was admittedly mediocre. I vowed to do better next time. I even took an extra step. I emailed and called a few contacts I know from the student government, people I’d met last semester, so they could give me the scoop on some things that were going on around campus in the near future. I figured I could use that information to write a story. But I’d gotten so caught up in my self-improvement that I made a critical mistake. I missed an email from my editor at the newspaper, as well as my professor reminding me of a news story that was supposed to be due that week. I’d completely forgotten about it. I explained the situation to my editors and they generously gave me an extension, saying that if I could get a story written in a few days, then everything would be squared away. I immediately, without hesitation, got started working on the story. The story that I chose to write about was a news story based on some interesting statistics released in the most recent college annual security report. For example, the campus has had a steady incline of reported rapes on campus over the past three years, and there are a couple ways to interpret that statistic: are more rapes occurring on campus or have recent changes in society empowered victims to speak up? The second statistic that was interesting was that of the 16 incidents that occurred on campus last year, and 15 of them occurred in dormitories. From a student perspective, I wondered “What can be done to keep this from happening in dorms?” My goal was to find someone who could help interpret the statistics. I talked to some students as well as the campus police.
The latter was a particularly interesting interview.
It was an hour long interview that ended up giving me far more information than I was probably capable of using. It felt easier this time to settle into a conversation with someone who was in a position of authority. I got home and I immediately emailed the head coordinator of the Title IX initiative here on campus. I’d say I was becoming braver. Learning to network with people and become braver and more immediate when it comes to contacting people has drastically improved my abilities to complete this assignment.
But emotionally I have to admit it was strenuous. At time it felt like an adventure because I was going around and finding information, and it was all so fast and productive. Other times I found myself feeling just completely alone with my own stress. It wasn’t in my personality to be that much of a go-getter. It’s like I forgot how to properly coordinate myself after going through the stress, and I quickly just reverted back to working, almost just completely out of fear, fear of not being productive enough, fear of letting down the people who I interviewed, fear of embarrassing myself in front of my friends.
To add to that, the emotional labor required for this effort affected other areas of my life. While it was beneficial to me in some ways, it was possibly detrimental to my other courses: I do not believe I performed particularly well on any exam I have taken this week as a result of this extra work I put upon myself. It had a negative impact on my social life as well, I didn’t speak to any of my friends at all that week, I spent all my free time conducting interviews and piecing together the story. My sleep schedule wasn’t doing so well either, I stayed up entire nights listening to recordings of interviews, trying to make sure I word things absolutely perfectly. I was just absolutely exhausted.
A Week Later
It turned out that my final source for my story wasn’t getting back to me as soon as I hoped. This was another important lesson. While I could have definitely put in more effort, and been a bit more proactive, accidents and setbacks are always to be expected. That was something I quickly learned: when it comes to Journalism, there is always a chance that something outside of your immediate control can go wrong. I could have done everything humanly possible to make a story good but at the end of the day, a lot of it depended on my sources. Despite how rough it was, I definitely learned useful lessons. I knew how to ask the right questions, I knew how to ask questions that would give me useable answers, and I knew who to contact and when to contact them.
Two Months Later
It was around December, about final exams week. Everything turned out fine thanks to my intense attitude towards working on everything. There were definitely short term issues regarding grades in my other classes but I managed to just barely catch up to bring things up to a passing grade for each class. Last week I looked back on those earlier months and I felt sick to my stomach with stress. That being said, knowing that I was able to eventually conquer those hardships eventually inspired me to perform well on my Final Exams. I suppose it was at this point where I really realized how applicable my lesson was to other parts of life.
If you really put your mind to it, you can accomplish far more than you would ever even imagine you’d ever be capable of. Moments like that can be very magical, but it takes putting in effort. Don’t put things off, do what you need to do as soon as you can. Trying is all it takes, and then it’s determination that keeps you going, that and a whole lotta coffee. Another thing that helped was probably the monster sized box of Apple Jacks I started keeping in my car, the Apple Jacks probably didn’t help that much but I managed to convince myself that they did. Little things pieces of inspiration like that can actually go a long way. I’m sure that throughout the course of things that I wrote in the past that my situation seemed pretty hopeless but in the end everything turned out okay, and I was able to stroll into my final exams just fine. I suppose if there’s a point to everything I’ve talked about it’s that… sometimes life can seem tough, but it’s through those tough times that we can learn how to do more than we could ever imagine in very short bursts of time.
In the end, I suppose that everyone has to go through a time in their life where everything seems kind of hopeless, and I was probably lucky to have my situation end well. I still hope that if anyone reads this that they get inspired to not give up and keep reaching for that goal.