Editor’s Note

I have enjoyed writing since I was a child. I have fond memories of sitting at the dining room table in my home while tracing letters in a workbook when I was five. From then on I enjoyed creative writing in school and dabbled with writing a fictional book of my own; I was so young that I had no idea what writing a book entailed. 

Throughout middle school and high school, I excelled in my English classes. High school is also when I started taking journalism. Journalism at Fluvanna County High School was mostly geared towards formatting and creating a high-quality, sellable yearbook. I took this class for a couple of years and learned how to use photoshop, plan meetings, format a yearbook and take vibrant photos while also practicing a skill I knew well: writing and editing weekly papers.   

When I started classes at PVCC in the Fall semester of 2018, only months after helping finish a fantastic yearbook for my senior year, I had no intent of taking journalism again. This is not because I did not enjoy journalism, but because I knew that journalism was not an easy elective class, a mistaken assumption I had made two years earlier in high school. But after three years of classes and a degree change, I decided that I was still interested in taking journalism again. 

Throughout my first semester of journalism in Dr. Whyte’s class, I struggled to fall back into writing weekly articles. Eventually, I had the opportunity to help format and design the articles that were to be published in The Forum. This made the long nights of writing and editing articles to be published and seen by the public worth it. When the class ended, I felt a rush of sadness, similar to the one I had felt on my last day of high school. So, this semester I am once again taking journalism as a new and hopefully improved assistant editor.