Print Articles
This was the first print story I wrote for The Muse. For this story, I talked in depth with history teachers and students to hear their opinions about representation in education. I also did a lot of research, reading through studies and reports on diversity in education and how its presence (or lack thereof) can affect students. In this article, I was able to take a national issue and narrow it down to the Dreyfoos spectrum by covering a class offered at the school aiming to increase the different points of view learned about in history classes.
This story is really important to me, not only because it's a subject I really care about but also because this story made cover. When I was writing this story, I knew that I had to get really emotional and impactful quotes, because that's the only real way to get to the heart of the matter with a story like this. I got quotes not only from students who were overcommitted, but from guidance counselors who were noticing this national trend as well. The design also came together so well, which was only possible through talking with the designer and working with them to collaborate on a design that really reflected the story.
To be honest, this article was hard for me. Although I had written a feature before, I had never written a sports article before, so connecting the sports aspect to the idea I had of feature writing was hard for me. I had to do heavy reconstruction on this piece, doing multiple follow up interviews and changing the angle of the article almost completely to make it more specific. I was also working with a strict word count that I couldn't go over, so while I had to expand the article to inject more personality into the article, I had to keep to a certain page limit. Ultimately, I'm happy with how the article turned out and how I was able to represent the subject of the profile after the extra work I put in.
This article was really interesting to write and I had a lot of fun writing it. I got to interview a lot of different people, both students and teachers, and hear all of their opinions on the new digital SAT and the future of testing. I also got to hear a lot of behind the scenes information of the digital SAT and how it works, which was interesting for me because I was going to be taking the digital PSAT soon after this article was written. This was also the first print cycle I had taken on after becoming coverage editor, so I had to navigate helping other staffers with their print articles and editing for other writers while working on my own article.
This article was special to me this year because I got to work with the photographer I worked with all throughout last year, and it was so nice to work and collaborate with her again after not working together for so long. Writing this article taught me a lot, and I loved interviewing all of the people on campus who are interested in technology, because I want to go into computer science and technology in the future and it was fun to learn about how that affected my school and report on it. Overall, I had a really good time writing this piece because I went in not knowing too much about e-waste in general or at our school, but I ended up with so much new knowledge and understanding of how our school uses technology.
This article was a huge undertaking for me but it was definitely one of the most important stories I have written. We did a paper survey to make sure the responses for the drug use questions were completely anonymous, and although it was so much work putting together all the survyes, printing them all, counting them out for each English class, collecting them after each survey, and hand entering the data into a spreadsheet, it was definitely worth it to ensure that the student body felt like their answers were secure. This article also had so much student voice in it, and I was amazed at how many students wanted to voice their experiences with drug use. Since this story took so much work, it was great to be able to work with another writer on it so that I wasn't alone in the endeavor. With all the effort and time we put into this piece, it became one of the most important stories I had told through journalism.
