Erin Hill - Summer 2003

I’ve never liked math … can’t stand science … and no matter how much sleep I get the night before a history class, I can catch an extra hour of shuteye there. But if there is one class that can keep my pupils nearly dilated, it’s a writing class.

I charge that to my seventh grade English teacher. She made learning about commas, subordinate clauses and prepositions like a game. We even sang songs when students didn’t use proper punctuation. She always sent those students to the “pit of destruction and the swamp of despair.” I didn’t want to go down under, so I became what my friends called a grammar geek.

When I was a freshman in high school in Detroit, my English teacher complimented me on ability to use a semicolon. At the end of the year, she recommended me to the journalism adviser.

Students talked about how easy the newspaper production class was – so I enrolled. It was a “bird course” I could fly right through. I soared from staff writer as a sophomore, to entertainment editor as a junior, to co-editor as a senior. But my flight didn’t stop there; I am a junior print journalism major at Hampton University in Hampton, Va.

I have worked at the college paper, the Hampton Script, for the past two years and will serve as office manager and second-year copy editor in the 2003-2004 school year.

After working as a newspaper copy editor for a few years, I hope to use my journalism background to initiate journalism programs in high schools that do not have them.

***