Journalism is a very fun class, but it brings many challenges with it. When I started taking this class back in August of 2016, I had no idea why the school put me here, but I do not regret their decision. I learned many things about the school during my time in journalism class, where you must work hard and use time efficiently if you want to succeed. This year I wrote articles about vehicles that students own, the history behind Miami High’s buildings, history of the Miami High Times, and two teachers that have been teaching here for 30 years that are retiring this year.

I had to face many deadlines when working on my articles. Every day that your work is late, the letter grade for the work goes down until it gets to the point where the teacher doesn’t even want it anymore because of how late it is. This can make working stressful, especially if someone doesn’t t know what they’re doing.

As a freshman journalist, it was very difficult during the first couple of months. I had to ask for a lot of help from my teacher and from experienced journalists. Not to mention, I didn’t know my way around the school, which increased the amount of time it took me to interview because I didn’t know where anything was or where to find the right person to interview for my big story.

That was very time-consuming, and it affected how long it took me to meet my deadlines. For each of our 5 newspaper issues, we have deadlines for writing our first drafts, turning in our final drafts, creating  a sidebar, taking a photo, covering a beat and transforming that into a news brief.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. In fact, it is very time-consuming because we have to make sure our articles are nearly perfect, edit the photos for our stories, and interview a lot of people at Miami High for our news briefs and big stories.

As time went by, however, the difficulty of the class started to decrease. Interviewing became easier because I started learning where things were located and shortcuts to get to a specific place faster. I also found myself not getting lost too often because I was learning the layout of the school. I also got used to the process of making a proper article for our newspaper.

Interviewing people I didn’t know was one of the many challenges I had to overcome in journalism class. Journalists have to go out and ask different questions to different people to get the information they need for their stories.

I didn’t like interviewing because I always felt nervous when I went up to people I didn’t know. I always felt anxious asking questions to random people. It wasn’t easy in the first couple of weeks, but I managed to overcome the fear and I found myself interviewing people without getting very nervous after the first four months of the school year.

Now that the school year is almost over, I believe that it is safe to say that journalism is a great class if you don’t slack off and know what you’re doing. You will not succeed in this class if you do not work hard since your letter grade on an assignment will decrease every day that you delay in doing your work. I would recommend journalism for people who feel comfortable interviewing and who have good writing skills.

The best part about taking this class was learning a lot about Miami High in general. Since journalists are encouraged to write articles about what occurs in Miami High, students can learn a lot about what happens in our school. The stories that I have read and made myself showed that Miami High has a lot of history behind it. Those articles have also showed that Miami High is a very successful school and has a lot of motivation to become one of the best schools.