Clear eyes, full heart
For my first story on newspaper staff, I was assigned what most first-year staffers were assigned — a new teacher feature. The editors’ idea was to give newbies a story that wouldn’t be too much of a heavy lift, but was still a high interest topic for Issue one coverage. I was assigned to cover […]
I don’t want to lose a teacher or classmate to Covid-19
I was appalled when the district announced the reopening of schools – a move that would allow students the choice to remain virtual, but would fail to grant district teachers the same choice. I wrote a letter to the AISD superintendent of schools to advocate for my teachers. After writing my first draft, I sent […]
Beautiful blue eyes
I wrote this column as part of the (virtual) Gloria Shields workshop in 2021. I was given the assignment to write about “a defining moment” while visiting my terminally ill grandpa in Florida. I didn’t need to look far for inspiration, and mostly wrote the piece to cope with the grief I was experiencing. My […]
Alamo Drafthouse finds a way
For our third issue of the 2020-21 school year, I pitched the idea of writing about the new phenomenon of renting out movie theaters for private showings during COVID-19. My family had done it a few weeks prior, and I figured I could find others who taken advantage of this popular new offering. After a […]
Following their (day) dreams
Walk into any classroom on the McCallum campus and it’s a safe bet that at least one of the students is a musician or in a band. This makes the annual Battle of the Bands competition a must-attend event for many of the school’s students — even more so because the winner and the runner-up […]
Universities, school districts respond differently to threat of omicron
Omicron. It loomed over my family as we drove cross-country to my grandmother’s house for winter break, hoping to evade the new strain of virus that spread more efficiently than before. But what we could work to contain on a personal level was building back home. The group chat for The Shield was inundated with […]
Between the borders
The story of the war in Ukraine broke in the middle of production for our fourth issue of The Shield. We felt compelled to include coverage but struggled to localize such major international news. One day as I was scrolling through Instagram, I saw a post from a former classmate, Sasha. She and her family […]
Back to the beginning
One of the most defining aspects of my time in high school was the nationwide teacher shortage. At the end of my sophomore year, more than 20 teachers had left McCallum. Undoubtedly this gave the school’s hiring team a good deal of work. It also created quite a lot of work for The Shield staff, […]
Nicotine advertising targets teens
When I was working on this page, I knew design would be important because the whole story revolved around the way advertisements for nicotine products use eye-catching images to target teenagers. I decided to lean in to this idea by making the main focus of the page a dominant illustration of a high-interest topic, that […]
Baxa’s first 100 days
When 20-year McCallum veteran Anda Baxa was named principal, I wanted to give a creative spin to the story by having him review his progress in the four main categories of evaluation for AISD principals after his first 100 days in the role — similar to the way a president is evaluated at the beginning […]
