Live from Camp: Halfway done

Two weeks. It’s been two weeks and camp is already halfway over. I remember my first day; I could barely get the courage to enter the classroom. Now I walk in every morning like I’m meeting my old friends and like I’m part of a family. The people I have met have such wonderful personalities and opinions on subjects I don’t even pay attention to. Just working with them is an educational experience, and I’m so happy I get to work with so many intelligent minds.

Today has been another hard working day. Once we entered through the door, we all went to the computers to work on our unfinished business such as setting up interviews, creating interview questions, and going to the location to interview one of our sources. Fortunately for me, I had the opportunity to interview a psychology professor here at the University of St. Thomas. Going into the interview I was as nervous as when I first started camp, if not more. Slowly panicking, Ms. Prichard welcomed me into her office and helped me feel more relaxed as the interview went on. As I left the interview feeling much better than when I entered, tragedy struck. The recorder I went into the interview with never started. That means many amazing quotes I was planning to write down in my future article have been lost. Fortunately, I wrote down many notes to help me in case this would happen.

Although I left the interview feeling defeated, my wonderful instructors told me that it was normal and not to get too stressed over it. Technology is the devil, Annie (my summer camp advisor) said to me once I told her my little disaster. Even though I knew the world wasn’t going to end, I still felt pretty disappointed.

After a few minutes, I got on the computer to start what I missed during my interview. We learned about leads, which are like topic sentences; and nutgraphs, which tell the reader why a story is newsworthy.

All and all, today was very productive on my case. I can’t wait to finish my story and see how far I’ve come. Two weeks left. Eight days. Eleven people I’m going to miss when this all comes to an end.

- Lorna Liu, Introduction to Journalism Camp ’11