To be honest, I joined Legacy completely by mistake. On the eve of my second semester, I couldn’t weasel my way into a gap, and my counselor and I had to pick a few classes. I wasn’t super excited by anything to fill in my school day, so I picked Lifetime Sports because I knew it had bowling and Newspaper because it was adjacent to Cougar TV (which I really wanted to join), and I knew people in the class (in which I mean just Shreya). Turns out Jessica was also in it, and she basically helped me go through the learning curve of Newspaper and its amazing micro-community of Swifties.

Most pertinent to my Newspaper experience is that I didn’t know how to write an article. Like, what even is an article? Half of my speech is mismatched, and the other half is slang from more than a decade ago. I mostly communicate through emojis and memes I find on the cesspits of Twitter. How can I write an article? What would I even write about? 

Well, I did what I saw in my only interaction with Legacy before I joined the class; I went to the cafeteria, and I started interviewing people. Newspaper is a surprising amount of fun. Once every week and a half, I write about whatever I want (mostly), however I want (mostly), whenever I want (mostly). It’s great, leagues better than I thought the class was going to be like. Socially, I’m an agent of chaos that’s completely hijacked the newspaper community, and I write articles like a Buzzfeed journalist with an extreme attraction to Pedro Pascal. Safe to say I’ve had a lot of fun in this class, and I’m sad that I waited until the last minute to join the class that made this semester a blast. But I am also very glad that I joined the class and experienced Jessica’s shenanigans with Rizziqua, Kate’s passive aggressive humor, Hadi’s compulsion to quote the constitution, Rose’s and Anthea’s obsession with Taylor Swift, Ms. McGee’s entertaining homelife and sass, all the other characters that just show up randomly, and the beauty of Devon Hartford’s writing (don’t look it up). 

The only thing I regret about high school is focusing so much on college. I’ve struggled to get my current GPA and accolades, but it didn’t really get me anywhere that was worth all of that stress and strife. High school classes are supposed to do either two things: challenge yourself and introduce you to new ideas and concepts. I challenged myself a lot academically, and there’s no shame in doing so; it’s how we get faster, stronger, smarter, better. But I didn’t do a lot of new things, such as this class. To everyone reading this, for the sake of your inner child, try to do something new that you’ve never done before.

Newspaper has been an experience I wouldn’t trade for any class either in Apex High or beyond, and I’d like to thank everyone in Ms. McGee’s third period for making my last semester at Apex High School the best I’ve ever had.