Bravetta Hassell - Hampton Short Course 2004

Just as in any place I go, it has always been a rule of thumb to look assured. Exiting the Washington Metro subway station, the first thing I think is to not look lost. Do not look lost. Indeed I am not, but am rather in the process of plotting my destination.

My first year in college seems to have escaped me so quickly that it feels as though only moments have passed by since I returned to the home I share with my mother, a middle school science teacher, in Lorton, Va.

Now the future awaits.

There was no exact age that I chose journalism to play a central role in who and what I was to become when I grew up. What I do remember are the extra books a first-grade teacher lent me to read, and sitting beside my mother practicing my cursive writing with WJLA-TV’s morning news blaring in the background. Did I understand what was going on in the world around me back then? Probably not, but there was a silent urge to know something … anything.

So I study at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University. The atrium of the school and the Script campus newspaper office are the closest things I call my “Home By the Sea,” the school’s nickname. When I close my eyes, I envision myself embracing my dreams as a newspaper journalist rushing, determined, down city sidewalks with notebook in hand, ready to take in all that I do and do not anticipate – life.

Certain things you just feel you’re born comfortable doing. For me, writing is one of them.

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