A little over a year ago I joined the Iowa State Daily with absolutely no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it. Now as a senior and as an editor at the Daily it boggles my mind to look at how much I enjoy what I do.

Until halfway through my sophomore year of college, I wanted to be a meteorologist, it’s what I’d wanted since I was in elementary school. I had never even contemplated working in news. Meteorology didn’t go well though.

I failed a couple classes and was struggling to find enough passion for what I was doing to make it worth it. So, on a bit of a whim, I decided to switch to journalism. Originally I wanted to focus on sports journalism.

But when I went to join the Daily last September there were no openings for a sports reporter and the next best opening was as a beat reporter for the ROTC at Iowa State.

I knew it would be good for me and that the experience I would gain would be helpful, yet I was still mildly disappointed knowing I wasn’t covering sports. I didn’t realize just how much my first beat would impact me.

After a handful of stories, I was enjoying reporting to an extent but I still wasn’t sold. However, a story fell to me about veterans on campus and it became my “aha!” moment.

Its called Project Cohort. A group of eight veterans who were students on campus came together for regular meetings, events and trips to bond and create a network for one another. For the majority of the members they weren’t typical college student ages, a few had kids and were married or commuted to Ames from the Des Moines area.

These factors often made it tough to create friendships with people on campus. Plus, the members of the cohort all had similar experiences in life in the military, which is something that not everyone could relate to.

The process of interviewing and writing that story showed me, for the first time, one of my favorite parts of journalism: the ability to touch and impact others lives.

When I was talking to the members, hearing their stories, listening to how Project Cohort had helped them each in unique and powerful ways, I loved being able to tell their stories to everyone else.

The Project Cohort story truly showed me why being a journalist is what I want to do. I’ve never been able to impact people’s lives more than I can with journalism. I that’s what I strive for, I was to impact and engage with as many readers and community members as possible each time I write an article.