These past four years I've spent a lot of time in my newsroom behind the keyboard or in the field as a photographer and interviewer. 

No matter what the story was I learned a lot throughout the process from my very first story in my Journalism 1 class about a student's journey from Brazil to Nebraska to more recently covering the US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona's visit to my school. The process not only taught me interviewing skills, writing skills, and AP style but mostly writing all of these stories taught me to listen. I had to listen to these people and truly try to understand what they were saying to craft a story worth publishing. 

Below you'll find a few samples of my work.

This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a high school journalist to cover an official visit from a federal official. I worked with my school principal and my advisor to secure a spot in the press pool. It was a little bit of a fight because originally a rule was decided that only one person from each of the OPS high schools was allowed to attend. I knew I had to take this opportunity to cover it but one of my fellow editors, Olivia Wallace who is a junior is also interested in a career in journalism so I worked with the school administration and my advisor to get both of us in the room with the Secretary as credentialed press. 

This story also earned me a Best of SNO award for Excellence in Writing, the second Best of SNO ever to come out of Bryan High.

This story created the most impact for me on how I approach my life. I've observed the drastic difference in how some of my teachers felt in my freshmen year before the pandemic and at the time of writing the story the third school year impacted by COVID-19. Some teachers vocalized their frustrations with us while others kept to themselves. I knew the problems in education existed but writing this story showed the scope of the issue was massive. I created an anonymous poll to allow every single staff member at the school to express how they felt without fear of retaliation. This story made me appreciate my teachers more and it gave the staff members of the school an outlet to know that at the least students are hearing their frustrations. 

This was one of the first stories I wrote while officially being on The Orator Newspaper staff. During our rounds of storyboarding, I noticed the #SaveOurChildren was trending nationally over social media and students were posting about it. I decided it was worth it to explore it and see what this human/child trafficking looked like in Nebraska. This was also my first time doing a story beyond the school by getting statements from public officials including the FBI's Omaha branch, Omaha Police Department, and the Nebraska Attorney General's Office. 

This story was not on my staff's radar at the time. Everyone on staff wasn't even alive at the time of his tenure with the school but I thought the life of this former principal was worth covering because the school was going to honor him. He was also an important figure in the Bryan community for 17 years. Many of our current staff members and educators across the sate were influenced by his leadership.

This was the story I created alongside Jada Sandvall & Mahi Jariwala at the AAJA JCamp over the summer of 2022 during our reporting activity in LA's Little Toyko. We are all doing a separate story on one business and decided that these stories could be tied together and it would be stronger if we all worked together to produce this story about the fashion scene in Little Toyko and how it relates to the Asian-American experience. 

This is an editorial I wrote after a staff discussion about the valedictorian title. During my doom scrolling on the internet I saw a school district in Colorado was getting rid of its valedictorian title. My first thought seeing this was why? I brought this up during our newspaper class where we had a discussion about it. We all came to agree that ditching the title and class rankings was something that schools shouldn't do. While our student body may not care that a small district in Colorado was doing it I was able to tie this closer to home while doing some research about the valedictorian title by showing some of our neighboring school districts were doing just that. 

This column was written during my sophomore year as commentary on President Biden's calling for a raise in the national minimum wage. This article qualified me for my first state journalism competition in Newspaper Column Writing which earned me 7th place.