MY STORY

Personal Narrative

For the most part, everyone in my family is a journalist. My mother works in Public Relations, and my dad is a Hearst employee at Channel 25. My uncle, along with all his sons, operates the massive cameras at the “Fins” games down in Miami. In high school, however, I realized that I might not have the forearms or thighs to lug around literal truckloads of equipment, but I can certainly carry a pen and notepad.

Only sophomores can join the yearbook at my school, but I realize now it's a chance for anyone who has any apprehension about being in a publication to take a step back. It's not just the speed of events at Dreyfoos that makes them intimidating, but also their scale. My first Prism, the school’s annual musical concert at the Kravitz Center, chills ran across my whole body when the curtains flew up, revealing a dense semicircle of strings and brass around the conductor while three steep layers of choir risers scaled the back of the stage. How does one even start to cover this?

I’ve been better understanding the answer to this question every year I’ve been on the Marquee: one starts with the individual. I can list the numbers the orchestra played, the difficulties of small group leaders across the whole event, the surface level “liking” or “disliking” of the event by the student body, or I can tell the story of a girl who fulfilled her lifetime dream of leading an opera piece, a pianist who strived to be in 17 groups to beat his sister’s 16 count, the jaw dropping awe a freshman similar to myself experienced.

Contrastingly, every experience on the Marquee has been at the team level, rather than the individual level. When I was coverage editor in 2024-25, the main difficulty was bringing my ideas for spreads to fruition and communicating the plan to designers. We have a sectional team on The Marquee where everyone is part of a specific section, rather than seeing their pages from planning to placement.

As the year progressed, I learnt that simply writing out directions on a doc like a king making orders from a forlorn castle wasn’t enough. I would set aside time to sit with designers and sketch out my vision for using subheadings and cutouts. I would talk to photographers and describe the saxophonist who put his hips into every solo I wanted covered, telling them to stand at half court at the end of the pep rally to catch the juniors running over to the senior bleachers.

Most of all, though, I found a home in the journalism community as a whole, and we have helped each other avoid disasters with quick thinking and trust. For instance, during the Mixed Company competition at the Florida Scholastic Press Association conference in 2025, Ryan, a student at Gulf Breeze High School in Pensacola, and I were tasked with creating a literary arts magazine spread, despite neither of us having much design experience, let alone lit-mag design. Stuck on ideas in his hotel room, I grabbed one of his friends and one of my pink shirts, and used it as a light gel filter for an artistic photo, winning us first place.

I thought things would slow down my senior year, but it is on me for thinking that “yearbook” and “slow” could ever co-exist. In the 2026 book, Because it Matters, we sought to convey the idea that there are so many things students think matter that they sometimes forget what actually gives them purpose. My job was to, on top of editing coverage for cohesion to the book, gather the coverage for the seven opening spreads of the book, zooming in on the scales of analysis of things that matter until we end at the individual (just as all things should be about the individual in a yearbook).

In the future, I want to combine journalism with my passion for music and science, two areas where communication is often desperately needed. Spending weekends at Barnes and Noble to read the latest issues of Prog, Computer Music, and Downbeat keeps me more than just entertained. The print journalism medium keeps me knowledgeable, inspired, and culturally literate, and I want to make sure this wealth of information is kept around forever.

FSPA

Florida Scholastic Press Association

• First Place Steven J. Thor Mixed Company

• First Place On-Spot News Story

  • Journalism Schools Place Immediacy

• Runner-Up Aspiring Young Journalist of the Year

• Third Place Q&A Camp Orlando

• Second Place Feature Story - FSPA District 7

  • On Record

Honor Societies

• National Honor Society 2024-present

• Spanish Honor Society 2023 - present

• History Honor Society 2024-present

Awards & Accomplishments

AP Awards

• AP Scholar with Distinction Award - 2025

• AP Scholar - 2024

Relevant Classes & Workshops

• Creative Writing I & II

• AICE English Language AS

• AICE English General Paper 1

• AP English Literature

• Speech 1 & 2

• TV Production Tech 1

• Public Relations Society of America Sunshine District SunCon Conference - AP Track - June 2023, July 2024

• Walsworth Yearbook Conference - August 2023, 2024 & 2025