During my time at Del Mar College, I ended up receiving much more than some credits and a diploma. My life and my goals for the future completely evolved into something I never would have guessed. And it all started with Foghorn News.

When I first started taking classes at Del Mar, it was mostly because my mom kept telling me to. After having taken some time off, too much time in her opinion, my mom was convinced I would never get a degree if I didn’t do it now. To her, putting this off was only wasting time and wasting the opportunity to create a better future for myself. “Just pass your classes and get your degree” she told me. So I registered, and slowly but surely started inching my way to the finish line.

As a Public Relations and Advertising major, part of my degree plan included a news writing class. As someone who loved writing research papers in high school, I figured it wouldn’t be so bad. And then I found out we had to interview people, make phone calls and emails and just communicate with others in general. Immediately, I knew I was out of my comfort zone.

“It’s just one semester, be uncomfortable for one semester, pass the class and get it over with,” I thought. But that’s not how it turned out.

I found an unexpected passion during a class I only took for the credits. I fell in love with connecting with others, hearing what they have to say, and weaving it all together to bring a well-rounded story to readers. I enjoyed it so much that I kept writing for the Foghorn, and it set me on a completely new and exciting path for the rest of my time at Del Mar.

I dove in headfirst: I wanted to cover more, to learn how to use the cameras and take better photos, to attend different events and meet new people to interview. I wanted to learn how to do the job right and do these stories justice. That passion took me places I never would have imagined. I was given the opportunity to represent the paper at different conferences in San Marcos, New Orleans, and even New York. During my time on the paper some of my work even won some awards, and our work as a team brought home even more. Everything the Foghorn staff has achieved as a team has been because each one of us had a passion for news that paid off.

Even with all our successes, it’s not always easy being a student journalist. You get rejected sometimes, and that’s fine. You work on time crunches, often trying to balance schoolwork and stories, but somehow (with lots of coffee) you make it all work. You get critiqued … A LOT, and you learn how to deal with being told that something you put hard work into might not be as good as you thought. You write, and rewrite, and rewrite some more. You have great story ideas that fizzle into nothing sometimes, so you pick back up and find another. You deal with dodged questions and the scavenger hunt for the truth. You work your butt off for a few years on staff, then everyone graduates, and the newsroom still picks up and moves on without you.

One news writing class set me down a path I never knew I’d end up on, and it all happened because I decided to do something outside of my comfort zone. I’m the type of person to try something once and then decide if it works out or not, and I highly recommend it. Don’t count something out just because it seems weird or a waste of time, or just overall not your vibe. Take the class, try the hobby, go to the event. You never know when you’re going to run into something that will change your life for the better.