Eba Hamid - Hampton University Short Course 2006

I used to ride around Oxford, Miss., tossing newspapers on people’s doorsteps. After mornings of folding and inserting, I was rarely inclined to actually open the newspaper and browse.

That changed in high school, though, when I landed in the introduction to journalism class. (I say landed when I mean my sister forced me to sign up, but I was scared she would read this and deny the claim.)

I was always a curious person, so I found the constant unveiling of information present in the industry to be quite comforting. Still, I didn’t warm up to the trade blindly.

I approached journalism like I do many things in my life: carefully. I didn’t trust it. It had to prove itself to me. And it did. Eventually.

Six years after that first class, journalism represents a big chunk of who I am. It’s taken over my life at Hampton University, where I am a rising junior. The furniture in my dorm room last semester practically floated in a sea of broadsheets and tabloids, not to mention stylebooks and reporter’s pads. Sometimes, I even got my roommate, a biology major, to put down the books and flip through a newspaper.

She and others around me see how engrossed I am in this journalism stuff. During the two weeks I was home after finals last semester, my older brother looked at me one night and asked: “You wanna go watch the news, so you can tell me what they’re doing wrong?”

I laughed, not realizing I’d gotten that bad. But, hey, a journalist should be a watchdog, right?

Now, I’m not sure exactly where I’ll end up. Journalism has made me happy for a long time. And as long as my happiness (and newspapers in print) remain, I’ll never stop being a watchdog or a cynic. They are both equally exciting.

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