In high school, you might feel compelled to find your perfect career path. The career you choose is supposed to be realistic, interesting, viable, and something you could see yourself doing for the rest of your life. That’s a hard blend to achieve, and there’s a lot of pressure to choose. 

This process almost always has to happen naturally, most students don’t realize their career through a quick search on Google. Sophomore Eva Andrews is one of the lucky few with a real dream job that has a unique blend of interests fitting her like a glove. But finding that niche didn’t happen overnight. 

“I was signing up for my classes at madison and I was like, ‘oh, journalism looks kinda interesting’. And so I signed up for it. And at first I really didn’t like it, I don’t know why I just didn’t like it. But then, after a few weeks, I got into the groove of things and I really liked it.”

The classroom was influential on Eva. Her first dream career was inspired by her elementary school teacher Jennifer. She was so inspired by her teacher Jennnfier that she dreamed of being an elementary teacher herself. Eva’s small class of twelve still keeps in contact with Jennifier, even though she now lives across the country. 

Her elementary school experience was unique because she went to a Montessori school. The Montessori philosophy views children as being naturally eager to learn and willing to initiate learning given an encouraging environment. It was there Eva met her best friend of eleven years, Isabella Smejtek. Isabella says the Montessori school was the “best elementary experience I could have asked for”. 

Middle school is where Eva found her love of writing. A major influencer was JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. She loved the series and she even wrote a biography on JK Rowling for school. But she said the problem was knowing what to write about. 

“I realized I’m not good at making up fiction to write about,” Eva said. “I just wanted to write about something.”

Eva then fell in love with journalism. However, it wasn’t immediate. Eva says she hated the first two weeks of freshman year journalism. She needed time to warm up to it, but once she did, Eva really loved it. 

Eva said one of her favorite pieces from freshman year was about the shooting range in the Marshall basement. She told the story of the rifle team Marshall used to have in the ’80s until it had to disband when a student brought a gun home. “The kids would rent rifles if they didn’t have their own and somehow some kid got a hold of a rifle that he wasn’t supposed to have and, ya know, hurt somebody” Talk about a story. 

As a sophomore, taking her second year of journalism, Eva is incredibly enthusiastic. “It was just about wanting to write something and finding the journalism class at Madison” Eva says. “I really like learning about other people’s stories and learning about the community, and like, with the shooting range story I just like learning about the history of the school that we were learning in. And so I like learning about history and the people and I guess I like writing too. And I’ve always really liked writing.”

Eva says opinion pieces are her favorite because she has “very strong opinions.” Eva also likes to stay local and write stories about people. She’s now the community section editor for the journalism staff. Eva has found a passion that suits her interests in people, writing, and activism. She says she plans to major in communications and build a career off of her love for journalism.