Well, here it is! After months of promising myself I'd start my blog, I finally did it.
I first want to say thank you to everyone who has made it to my page! Whether you're family, a friend, or a professional connection, I'm glad you're here.
So, what am I planning to accomplish in this and the following posts?
For this one, I want to lay out who I am: my personal and professional goals, what I'm passionate about, and some key things about me. In future blogs, I'll be delving into the big events in my life and maybe even analyzing some interesting news stories. I want this site to be not only a professional extension of my resume, but a place to elaborate on my own personal and academic interests as well. Plus, I just know my parents and grandparents really want me to write on a platform that they can easily access! :)
A little about me, then: I'm from Yorktown, Virginia (if you don't know where that is, think Revolutionary War, Battle of Yorktown), I'm an only child, and I study Journalism at St. John's University in Queens, New York.
Growing up, I loved where I lived. The Hampton Roads area has a beautiful, diverse mix of urban and rural beauty. I was never bored. A regular weekend for the Wanderer family could consist of breakfast at Pop's, a family-owned diner in Yorktown, lunch on Granby Street in Norfolk followed by a visit with my grandparents, and then dinner in Colonial Williamsburg at pan-Asian buffet Peking.
All that easy travel between vastly different communities left me hungry for travel and a fast-paced life style.
Sports and exercise have always been a part of my life. But I was awful at just about every sport, and the ball was never my friend. In high school, though, I joined cross country to fit in with my friends and I actually was pretty good at it.
After that, I did track and cross country every season. I went to to states 12 times and my 4 by 8 team even won during indoor junior year. Track, specifically my coach, made me tougher than I ever thought I could be. Seeing my results correlate with the work I put in was extremely satisfying, and the camaraderie that developed between my teammates and I was invaluable.
Track also gave me my first real taste of failure. There were MANY times that I was not as fast as my opponents and my races didn't always correspond with my practice times. I learned that this is also okay. The best memories I have still are of the little successes during practice and the laughs shared with my team and coach.
I spent a lot of time running back then, but I also deeply pursued other interests. Sometimes I even forget about my seven years spent taking horseback riding lessons and the years I spent learning how to operate the camera my granddad gave me when I was 15. Back then, I gained invaluable time management skills and I realized just how many things I am interested in.
Applying to colleges was then all about where I could pursue a variety of different activities; so naturally, I looked at city schools. I exclusively applied to schools in cities, and, on a whim, I applied to St. John’s University.
I had no knowledge of St. John’s until I received a few emails from them senior year. I saw that it was located in the city, so I looked at the campus and decided it was my best bet for my major at a reasonable cost.
I ended up falling in love with St. John’s, mostly because it is so different from where I expected to be going. SJU is a Catholic school, so it’s provided me with opportunities in service that I never would have had otherwise. I’ve brought meals to the homeless in Manhattan and helped special needs children ride horses as a part of their therapy. I also became a part of Alpha Phi Omega, the national service fraternity, and I served with my peers.
I joined a host of other organizations at St. John’s, and I even landed two jobs: one in the Writing Center and one with IMG College, a huge marketing company. I owe most of these opportunities, as well as my internship with the Queens Courier, to living in New York City. Coming to St. John’s has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and there is no better proof of this than that it has allowed me to study abroad.
Currently, I’m on a semester-long program that was meant to take me around Europe: five weeks each in Rome, Limerick (in Ireland), and Paris. This has been slightly disrupted, though, due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Even if I had to leave today, I still would have been to eight countries and 12 cities abroad.
For the future, I plan to continue to travel as much as I can. My number one goal is to serve the community through journalism and photography. I'm open to just about any opportunity in the broad field of journalism, and I know I am adaptable enough to excel with the proper training.
In the next posts I’m going to focus on a little bit of what I’ve done abroad so far and post some photos I’ve taken to document!
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