Taylor Van Dijk | Editor-in-Chief
May 23, 2025
As the end of the school year rapidly approaches, I find myself reflecting on my last four years at San Clemente High School. As seniors, we all want to say that our experiences as individuals are entirely unique. That this year, working towards graduating has been an enriching and empowering race to the finish line. Yet, now that I am counting down the days until I walk across the stage, I find everything that I have been told by the classes before me is overstated and almost entirely made up.
Speaking to my peers and every adult around me, I have gathered that for most, the high school experience is almost the exact same. And, while I do agree with the keen advice that “your grades do not define you as an individual” and “embracing individuality is empowering,” this advice is oftentimes overly-simplified and generalized, and it does not significantly help to inform an individual’s experience. In fact, the most significant thing that I have learned is that it is every person’s first time living life, and they are just making it up as they go.
Now, that being said, I do have some reflections to give about my empowering and enriching experience in the newspaper class.
I originally took a newspaper because I love to write, but I have discovered that this class is so much more than that. For me, instead of focusing on the biweekly article assignments that are imposed upon us, I made the active choice to embrace the opportunity to write about literally anything. Not many jobs or classes in life give a person the ability to have full control over the content that they put out or the direction that they want to take with an assignment. The only requirement is the word count, and the rest is up for the individual to decide.
As student writers, we are the voice of our generation. And, in the technological age, that can actually mean something. In modern journalism, there is an interesting dichotomy between the technological advancement of media as both a barrier and a road. On one hand, individual voices can be heard and amplified on any issue through social media networks, which can not only increase accessibility to information, but also allow citizens to choose where they wish to receive information from. But, on the other hand, without checks, balances, and barriers to fact-check media, misinformation runs rampant across technological platforms. Yet, even as students writing for a high school newspaper, our writers are adding to the hub of internet sources that are responsible for shaping the opinions of the entire world. Now, platforms can be given to anyone that has something to say, which is empowering and terrifying at the same time.
And with that uncertainty, I, as an individual, am intrigued. I never expected to choose an uncertain life path such as pursuing journalism in college whilst not knowing what the future holds for the profession. Yet, the constructs that encourage students to go into “safe” careers such as medicine and law, to me, inherently encourage an unhappy sterility to life that I do not choose to subscribe to. To me, high school is a stepping stone to equip you for the rest of your life, so just do the things that interest you and don’t stress too much about the details.
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