“Mr. Penrose, I’m Ramzy from the North Star. May I request your time for an interview about the stadium construction project?”
I ended up sitting with him, the school athletic director, for half an hour in a golf cart touring the project like a professional journalist.
My passion for journalism started long ago when I was in middle school; when being a reporter means countless hours of cutting and pasting handwritten news in the wall magazine. I love hunting for stories, because it involved so many things: researching the background, interviewing the sources, writing down the notes, and transform it into well-written paragraphs. I found writing as a strangely sobering activity, like drinking coffee in the morning or flexing the muscles.
When I first arrived in the United States, the first thing I searched for at my school was the school newspaper. I had been editor for the school magazine back home, but carrying your press pass in a language other than Indonesian certainly bringing some new sensation on it. And I was ready to be a reporter once again, free from any editorial responsibility that I had carried for past year back home.
Fortunately, like most of American high schools, my school has a quite excellent journalism program. Here, unlike in Indonesia, school newspaper is part of the curricula itself, taught by a teacher and consists of two classes: Journalism I and II for beginners, and Newspaper for the advanced. I was accepted to the Newspaper class.
I was not assigned any story for the first edition: instead, I took pictures for story about the district marching band. This was one of my favorite part of being a journalist: you can be assigned to literally anything. You need to be flexible and versatile on doing your job. One time you might find yourself scribbling through notes of interview about the arts project, and then you might be standing in sidelines of the football game. You’ll never know.
My first “true” story is in the second issue, which was about the renovation project of the school sports facility, including the aging football stadium. That was quite interesting, because the athletic director was kind enough to give me a tour of the project in such a style, like I described above. Touring the school with golf car? I’ve done it.
Since 2016 was an election year, I also had the privilege of covering the race for Governor of Indiana. The first debate for the election was held in my school’s auditorium, and I was assigned to take the pictures of that event and the press conference afterwards. Working alongside professional journalists from Indiana’s leading TV and newspapers was an absolutely terrific experience for me. Also, one of the candidate was kind enough to recognize my colleague during the press conference and asked him to deliver a question. Well, that’s a pretty big deal.
The highlight of my journalism career here, however, was the 2016 National High School Journalism Convention, which was held in Indianapolis. The timing cannot be more uncanny. For three days, we the newspaper staff got to attend sessions about student journalism and met thousands of other student journalists from all over the country. Because I was particularly interested to sports and politics, I attended talks by prominent syndicated sports writer Bob Kravitz and Gregg Doyel, as well as from a school teacher who led her school media team through the tense moments of racial riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
It didn’t stop there, however. The best part was that I got to ask a question to Walter Robinson, one of my journalistic hero. If you watched Oscar-winning movie “Spotlight”, you must noticed that Batman-turned-Birdman Michael Keaton played the editor for the Boston Globe investigative team. That was Robinson, who won Pulitzer as part of the team for his ground-breaking coverage of Boston Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal in 2003. I asked him a question about how school journalists should cover sexual and gender abuses that happened in school grounds. He was delighted; I was dumbstruck, totally in awe.
To think it for a moment, I couldn’t get much better experience than this. Yes, I would say that my experience with the school newspaper is probably one of the best decision I took during my exchange year.
Being a reporter means that you get to know the school environment better, which is terribly important for an exchange student trying to immerse him or herself to the new culture. I almost always introduce myself an exchange student to whomever I interview, so they could understand that I’m not only looking for a story to write and file; I’m also looking to understand how things works here, why it works like that, and what can I learn from it. And most of them were open, even highly delighted when hearing my background, because that means that they could, too, do the same thing.
That is a great way to build intercultural understanding, I think. To listen to new stories, to open yourself to new perspectives, to explore previously uncharted terrains, to try to understand somebody from their mindset and point of view. Not everybody can do this; but journalists, with your press passes and a healthy dose of curiosity, could steer the conversation into a meaningful story, into a memorable understanding. I had the privilege to all of this, and I’m forever grateful for that.
And one plus: I keep the memories of my exchange experience alive between the order of phrases and strands of papers. The world will forever know that once upon a time, an Indonesian exchange student wrote a 500-word opinion piece about fake clown attack and pop culture paranoia in the United States. It will be forever in print, in digital, and in hearts and memories of those who read it. (Full disclosure: don’t ask me why I want to write a 500-word opinion piece about clown. I have no idea.)
I like to think that my whole exchange experience has been like a white blank page. As days and months passed, the page will eventually filled up, written with all of my experiences. And like everything else, it will end soon then you think. Like reporters scrambling their pads to fill deadlines, exchange students have deadlines, too.
Initially published in Bina Antarbudaya's Medium channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment