By Collette O’Neal (Whetstone staff writer)

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a journalist. In fact, I didn’t even know I liked to write until my junior year of high school.

It’s funny because I’ve been writing as far back as I can remember. Even before I knew how to write I was writing.

Collette O'Neal

My mom would come up to me and I would say, “Look, mommy, I’m writing a story!” My mom would look down at the paper full of scribbles and say, “That’s great sweetie, what does it say?”

And I would give her an elaborate story that would fill three or four pages of scribbles rather than five lines.

When I was older, I wrote poems as a way to release my bottled-up emotions and frustrations. I even joined my middle school’s poetry club and had two of my poems published in the local paper.

Now that I look back at them, they were the cheesiest little poems. Then I stopped writing for a while. I’m not exactly sure why.

When I started looking into colleges in my junior year, I had difficulty figuring out what my major would be.

So I went back to what interested me and came up with writing. From there I looked at possible majors and came up with English.

Once I figured out what my major was going to be, I researched which jobs I could get and I thought about becoming a journalist.

Then when I came to Wesley, I did The Whetstone for credit and loved it.

The thing I think I enjoy the most is the people you get to meet. You get the chance to know them on a level that’s totally different than if you were in the classroom, or just walking around campus.

I like being part of something bigger than myself. I’m able to let people know what’s going on around campus, whether it’s good or bad news.

Yes, it is hard work sometimes, and, yes, sometimes we get negative comments and reviews, but that’s all part of working for a newspaper. We take the feedback into consideration and move on.

Why dwell on what used to be, when it’s just “old news?”

Being a journalist is my passion, and I would never have known that without The Whetstone.