Branching Out
I joined ACCSA for a couple of reasons. First, it allowed me to explore opportunities and potential areas of work that I was interested in as a future career. It allowed me to explore life, media, and journalism through a perspective of equity and diversity which is something that I wanted to do as part of my career. I was choosing between a few groups in the media center but was really drawn to ACCSA’s emphasis on celebrating each others’ diversity, especially after we all went through such polarizing and difficult last few years.
I definitely was very nervous when I first joined ACCSA and was worried about balancing all of the different things I wanted to do in my first year but even if I couldn’t come to every meeting, every one I attended was so helpful and gave me plenty of opportunities to put into practice the things I wanted to do with the organization. What’s more, you could take on as big or as small of a role in each project as you are comfortable with, which I found to be really cool. As time went on, I began to get more and more involved and got to head a few really great projects that I’m really proud of.
My first big project I was part of was ACCSA’s Women’s History Month celebration. For this project, I and a couple of other students went around campus and asked students about a woman in history that they admire and why. This was a really big project and I was nervous about how to go about it, but I got so much support from my co-producers and Miki Turner that it made the whole process so much easier. Hearing each student’s explanations really made me see how fun it was to be able to go around and learn more about the diverse lives of students around me, including more about their interests and goals for their time at USC. Doing projects that allowed me to interview new and different people became one of my favorite parts of the job.
Soon after the conclusion of the Women’s History Month project, my fellow leader Skyler and I, along with many other student collaborators, worked on a short documentary called The Affected: We’ve Got This. This project was partnered with students from Xavier University in Louisiana, and together we interviewed students and workers from all walks of life about how the past two years of COVID-19 had impacted their lives, careers, and education. These interviews allowed students to be vulnerable and share their stories of loss, hardship, mental health, and resilience. Our documentary was shown at the Pan African Film Festival last spring and it was really inspiring to see each student use their differences to bring people together.
Everything that I had worked on and accomplished at ACCSA were things I’d never thought could be possible, especially for a freshman, but each experience made me more confident in my abilities and gave me a better idea of what I wanted to do in the future. I’ve always been someone who tries to branch out and learn from as many different people and experiences as I can, and ACCSA has given me the opportunity to do just that and so much more.
