In the first semester at U of I, the journalism course opened the door to the newsroom for me. As someone holding a passion to be a journalist and write non-fiction stories, I’ve gained some experience and participated in some projects uncovering local events in my native high school, but in a simplified and inadequate way. Confronting with language barriers and the lack of theoretical study for journalism, my start of learning was full of disappointment. It is challenging for me to change my writing habit, style, and language to another different field, without opinion and rhetorical devices. But in the duration of direct practice in journalism work, which forced me to overcome all the roadblocks on the way to creating my own story, I gradually found the rhythm for me to communicate with people, write stories in my second language, and uncover topics that I could never complete before.

The most important thing I learned in this duration of study is that journalism is all about communication, to acquire enough information from sources, it is necessary to go to the interviewees several times, which might tax difficulties to report the story efficiently. When writing the profile story of Makahmbetova, I still need some information from her to give an ending, but due to the interviewee’s unpredictable schedule pressure, I could not conclude them before the deadline. Meeting people in person is much more helpful to solve this issue, so in the early communication of my enterprise story uncovering Chinese students’ on-campus protest, I met every interviewee except one living in Canada in person. There are many other communication techniques for journalists to gather information from human sources, and I think previous research is extremely important because it can not only help you to have a proper sense to organize the outline of the story, but also show respect to the people you meet. 

I always define myself as an introverted person, which is raised question by many people: so why do you want to study journalism? In general, I would say it is because journalism can be the speaker for people. I was proud of my enterprise story and its publishment on Illinois Public Media. Writing this story is my highlight moment of the past four-month college life. It is impossible for me in China to publish a story about the revolt against dictatorship and even have the conception, but now I am truly involved in covering stories I want to report. That process, along with all the fear, disagreements, and threats, gave me the chance to experience the reality of being a journalist. But I believe that I should be aware of my limitation: having access to the community I am familiar with is helpful for me to complete this project, but I could not over-rely on my comfort zone. Before entering the newsroom for gathering real news, I need to develop my ability to reach out to more people and expand my horizon to go deep into various topics.

During this semester, I also met a lot of warm-hearted people, who gave me genuine help and guide me not to degrade myself. I want to quote one of them: overall, you are doing a great job! I truly feel grateful when looking back at the work I have done, and compared to the one who struggled with English tests, I am now prepared to be a journalist.