Let's See How Far We've Come 2017: The Year in Review

I just wrote all the birthdays, anniversaries and school schedule on my mother's large kitchen calendar, which must mean we're approaching the end of yet another year. With the change of  calendars comes my my annual year in review post.

Believe it or not, this is my fifth year-in-review post. I lamented last year that I didn't write much here in 2016. While I resolved to rectify that, apparently my unconscious took that as a challenge to write even less. I did publish my five letters from the editor here, but the blog was fairly neglected. I had decent excuses for myself - 2017 was incredibly busy for me personally - but at the end of the day, I like to look back at this site to remind me of what all happened and how I felt in the moment. But enough about my shortcomings - here goes nothing!

I rang in 2017 with my parents at home - any and all plans with friends had fallen through and frankly I enjoyed the quiet. At the stroke of midnight, I became editor-in-chief of the Globe, began my junior year of college, and embarked on what will go down as one of the craziest years so far. I continued my work as a resident educator on the 16th floor of Lawrence Hall. Bobby and I rebooted NewsNight into its current, nightly-news style program. At that point, we were doing the show every other week in the Center for Media Innovation.

The first edition of the Globe in February brought with it an editorial that changed everything. Shortly after publishing, the university president called me into his office and we talked about tuition increases. I'd like to think at this point we have a good, professional relationship and I would say it started there. February brought with it the 50th anniversary of the Globe, and a campus-wide celebration including a Snapchat filter and throwback logo on the front page. On the whole, February was a lot about continuing what I started: NewsNight began ramping up, the paper was in full swing. It was also about looking ahead: we had meetings about taking a trip to the university of Salford Manchester slated for that May.

March began with spring break and the Intercollegiate Broadcast System Awards in New York. I'm proud to say that the previous September's interview with Sarah Koenig brought me, Vinnie and Brandon a win. The conference was enlightening, but the night we won the award was a whirlwind: I began the day standing in a line in Times Square to get student rush tickets for Sunset Boulevard alongside Kayla Snyder and a girl named Trillium. After winning and taking pictures, I bolted the 13 blocks or so from the Hotel Pennsylvania up to the Palace Theatre in a suit. IT WAS COMPLETELY WORTH IT. March also brought the Globe's 50th anniversary celebration in the Lawrence Hall Lobbies. There's so much to say but suffice it to say: we invited as many people as we could think of, and 121 people came out to celebrate the history of our little paper.

April brought with it several conferences, the first being the Society of Professional Journalists conference in Detroit, Michigan. I didn't win anything myself, but our paper took home several accolades and I was a finalist for two Mark of Excellence Awards. I turned 20 in April, the day before Eastern Orthodox Easter. Emily Bennett and I went to New York City to participate in the New York Times Editor workshop. That Thursday evening we went on an adventure that became my radio production final, Night Court. As much as I would love to link you to Night Court, I'm also super hesitant because it's a dramatized version of actual events, and I haven't actually the permission from the subject to publish it. For what it's worth, though, it earned me an A and featured the voices of Kris Chandler, Bobby Bertha and Carrie Reale. I finished my work as a Resident Educator, and ended the 2016-2017 school year.

May began my summer and my foray into public radio with an internship at WESA in its newsroom. It also brought with it my whirlwind trip to Manchester, England. It was billed as the trip of a lifetime, and it certainly was. I spent 10 days in Manchester, and met some amazing folks like Adam Roberts, Megan Hayward, Megan Hornsby, Callum Phillips, Fay Toulios and Tom Hinkley at Shock! Radio, Siobhan McAndrews from BBC Radio 6 and Geoff McQueen who was our lecturer for the week. It was a crash-course in UK radio and capped off by - several things. The course itself was capped off by an on-air show with Wythenshawe radio, but there were several other adventures within it including a bar crawl that ended with me being cursed, there was a concert in the basement of a place called the Soup Kitchen, and countless other mini-trips.

As I said earlier this year, the trip was most noted by the outside world by the Ariana Grande Concert Bombing on 22 May. In retrospect, I had been able to sample in some way, shape, or form the culture and art of Manchester before that. It'd be irresponsible of me to say that I got to know the place well, but it certainly felt like it by the end of the trip. I say that because thinking about the bombing - it's heartbreaking to think about such a vibrant, cultural place to become the target of a terrorist attack and have to deal with the aftermath of tragedy. But if I've learned anything about Mancunians, it's that they move on. Be it World War II, the fall of the textile export industry, or even May's heinous act, they come back strong.

June brought with it my experience at WESA-FM, Pittsburgh's NPR News Station as well as my summer job at Forsythe Mini Golf. To tell you the truth, June, July and the first part of August kind of blur together for me. At WESA, I was lucky enough to be a part of several stories and learn the workflow of a full-fledged public media operation. I was able to do a 3-minute feature on noise in Pittsburgh and some other odds and ends throughout the summer. I also learned the trick to South Side Parking: don't. I can unequivocally say that Forsythe was my favorite job to date. I got to be outside, help people and use my inner whimsy to operate a mini golf stand. I had fantastic bosses - Sam and Kristi are not only great bosses but I'd like to consider them friends. It's a true family business over there - when I had to head back to school in August, they hosted all three of their employees for dinner at the family homestead. I have a whole playlist of music that I played over their stereo in the Golf Shack, and every once in a blue moon I'll play it to reminisce.

August brought back the rush of school. I finished my internship and my employment with Forsythe and moved back to Point Park - this time to the boulevard apartments. Greg came down and we watched the solar eclipse in village park. The full time professor union struck their first-ever contract with the university, and the Globe broke the story. I began a new semester of classes and we were full steam ahead with a new semester of the Globe. On the first day of school I made two dumb decisions and had a meeting with the president. Ultimately, all three of those things were resolved. But it's funny looking back at it all to see what worked out and how it all ended up working out.

September brought with it the full insanity of the school year: we launched the Pioneer Public video series for the Globe, I took on 5 classes, and apparently made it my mission to work as many hours as possible to make myself sick. We began season 2 (really 3 but we can't count that one pilot as a season) of NewsNight and I returned to work at the Post-Gazette for high school football and basketball season.

October felt a lot like September - too much work and not enough me to go around. I had to make a mid-semester hire for our Arts and Entertainment section, and we began using both television studios on campus to produce NewsNight - an adventure in ridiculousness and coordination. At the end of the month, I made a point of stopping the constant spin. Alongside Vince and Beth and some friends, we rounded out the month with a trip to Hundred Acres Manor and watching the Great Pumpkin in the apartment. It was in October that things got a little rough, but also when I decided to take some time to spend more time with friends and be more **festive** with my life.

November was an entertaining undertaking - I spent a weekend in Carnegie shooting a video press kit for the Andrew Carnegie Free Library alongside Nick Kasisky and Robert Berger. It was also in November that I started trying to figure out what's next after the Globe.

And so this is Christmas. Well, New Years. December was insanely frontloaded with finals and such. After that were several short, quiet Christmas festivities. I was informed earlier this week that I was named General Manager of WPPJ for the spring semester. So that's what I'll be occupying my January, February, March and April with. But as with the past two Decembers, I slowed my 120 miles per hour year to a more manageable 60 or so...

I could honestly copy-paste last year's ending to this year's post. At the end of the day, I'm incredibly excited to see what the future holds. This year has been a great amount of work but I'm glad to have done it all with some of my favorite people in this world. I've traveled across the mid-Atlantic and to Manchester and all sorts of places. I've played miniature golf, attended an inauguration, celebrated the 50th anniversary of a paper as its editor, and it's hard to believe that this is the "start" of my life, but it's easy to see how these are some the greatest moments in my short life thusfar.

As for what the future holds - I don't know. I know this much: I'm greeting 2018 with optimism and some new energy. I hope I can have half as great a year as this one moving forward.

So here's to you and yours - have a happy, peaceful and pleasant new year! Go fight win!

A Reason to Live and a Reason to Grow

It's been a while since I last posted here. Quite a while actually.

I've been so hesitant to openly express myself since the whole Carlynton clarification debacle, and it takes quite a bit of time for me to sit down and actually write outside the conventions of journalism and broadcasting and essays and the six other types of  writing we're expected to do in college.

So why now? I'm in a transition period. As I said in my kind-of-out-there letter from the editor this week, I've been so obsessed with the bookends of life that I sometimes forget that life is the culmination of a bunch of small turns and moments and interactions.

I've learned quite a bit this semester about my craft, about the world and about myself. I'm transitioning my way out of one of the wildest stretches professionally I've worked within: the job of Editor-in-Chief of the Globe.

I can't say I was surprised by the amount of work that went into it - it reminded me a lot of being Senior Patrol Leader mixed with the journalistic training that I've been working on in some way, shape or form since I was in fourth grade.

What I did find surprising, and perhaps this is my own naivety, was the mixture of ego and apathy that I encountered - both among writers (or lack thereof) and the editors. I hired some fantastic folks to edit the paper, and I feel like that showed this semester. However, an inherent apathy towards collaboration frustrated me to no end. I had huge plans going into this semester and for a plethora of reasons, those never came to fruition.

It seems things start getting bad for me personally in October. This October I started feeling the effects of taking on as many jobs as I had, and for the first time that I can remember, I met that feeling with an allowance to be human for once. Have my grades suffered? Probably. Do I mind? No, because I can't - unlike so many folks I've seen before me - say that I'm burned out.

Burning out is significantly different than being exhausted. I will readily admit that I am incredibly exhausted being a full-time student, full-time editor, part-time television producer, part-time studio technician and ten thousand other things I usually forget to list.

Being burned out is getting to a point where you no longer want to do what you do - and have no motivation to change that feeling. Being burned out is laying down and resigning yourself to mediocrity. Being burned out is handing yourself over to vices and distracting yourself from facing the reality that you don't have any motivation to continue.

At least that's my rough colloquial definition.

At this juncture in my life, I still want to be a journalist, but I feel far more confident in my ability as a producer than I do as a reporter. I feel far more confident in my ability to craft, manage, write and produce content like the WESA noise story and the Carnegie-Carnegie VPK than I do crack open some wildly investigative thing. That's not to say I can't do it (because I can and would like greatly to do so), that's to say that I feel most comfortable working within a news/feature genre. I digress.

I've learned that pretending to be a social person results in being asked the same question over and over. In high school you're asked what college you're planning on going to. As you start college people ask - and still do - what you're studying. If you're particularly unlucky, you get the question: so what are you going to do with that? I'm almost a year out from graduation, and let me tell you, the closer the months get the more nervous I am of what's on the horizon.

Lately, however, the question my friends have been asking me is if I will be involved with the Globe after my term as EiC. While it makes sense to ask, I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to be doing. That's a combination of choices by Emily Bennett (the next Editor) and me (I applied to be news editor because I love laying out pages). But, as Gregory Alan Isakov's song says, "Time Will Tell."

I've come to look for America...

I feel like the Simon and Garfunkel song they're currently using in Volkswagen commercials fits my bizarre mood at the moment - it reminds me of a wanderlust and paranoia that I don't actually possess but kind of want. Well, more the wanderlust than the paranoia but I digress.

It's been a while since I last wrote here. I've tried a few times to take a crack at writing again, and while journalistically I've been fairly successful, the personal writing that I used to have a good groove at I've gotten decidedly, well, rusty. So here's hoping that draft number 5 sticks!

I count myself incredibly lucky. As much as I despise long stretches of active travelling (being on a physical plane, bus or train for 6+ hours), I do really love to travel. I've been able to do a lot of that recently. I've been to Washington, D.C. twice (for inauguration-related things), New York City twice (WPPJ and the Globe),  Detroit, Michigan (the Globe) and most recently, Manchester England. 

I've learned an awful lot about travel and myself these past few months. For one: I don't much mind living out of a suitcase at this juncture. 

Also, if I travel with a camera I take a lot of pictures. Hundreds. Only about 10% of these ever see the light of day, and travelling more has built a backlog of images, but nonetheless they exist for me to mess with as I see fit. 

I don't remember how I got into photography, but I do know that I've been getting progressively better and smarter with it. I prefer landscapes to people (which shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me well) and I prefer vivid color and depth to brightness. 

There's a fine line between documenting a trip and actually experiencing that trip. There is no way to non-intrusively document a trip. For the most recent trip to England, I attempted to do so by isolating my intense photography to two days and keeping a personal audio recorder with me to record little things like the tramlines and the behind-the-scenes of a radio show.

I should probably explain why I was in Manchester. I was in a group of eight Point Park students (3 animation students, 5 broadcast students and 2 equally displaced and confused professors) and went to study radio in the UK as well as seek a cultural exchange. It was a ten day trip most noted by the outside for day 8 when some soulless fellow decided to detonate a bomb outside an Ariana Grande concert. 

I've said my peace in the media swarm that followed, and I maintain that I personally don't add anything to this story. To me, my 10 day stint in Manchester was a wonderful cultural exchange where I met some amazing people - like Tom Hinkley who works with Shock Radio, or Samantha Potter who was on a two week intensive with the BBC, or Geoff McQueen, a fascinating lecturer from Scotland who served as our general guide throughout the Manchester Experience. 

I consider myself incredibly lucky: I've been afforded the opportunity to travel to some amazing places for minimal expense (DC both times, NYC the second time, and Detroit were completely paid for by the University). I'm now working a summer job with Forsythe Mini Golf as well as at an internship with 90.5 WESA, Pittsburgh's NPR News Station. 

And I'm not satisfied, or remotely comfortable. Which I consider a blessing. A wise man once challenged me to get out of my comfort zone. Never too far, but far enough that it's something new. In that case, it was camping with the scouts. Which led to a New York City trip 8 years ago. And I have kept moving forward since. 

I have this philosophy on life wherein if I'm comfortable either I'm not trying hard enough or there's something amazing about to happen. 

I consider myself lucky: I've created two radio shows, a television show, planned four floor events as a resident educator, and a 50th anniversary event for a newspaper that I have no business heading just yet but am anyway. 

I start getting super introspective during the summer, because for once things slow down a little. I've always had trouble properly relaxing, but I feel like I'm getting a little better with that.

I'm not sure where I'm going next, but frankly I welcome that unknown. 

Hello World. It's me, Alex.

So last time I posted here it got, well, heavy. I can't say I was told to post what I had posted, but I can say that I felt severely judged in the wake of the original post so I was motivated to write something to counter it. The original narrative was that I was trying to save a job but to be frank, other than some individuals the district didn't bat an eye. But I still wrote a piece I completely stand behind. That piece just happened to end up being ridiculously long.

That aside, I stand behind what I say. But I do have to say, I spent a week writing that and have been incredibly hesitant to post here since. Being careful about every written word is draining when all you started with was a hobby. Frankly, I haven't done that for that reason exactly. That and the fact that I haven't had a lot of free time.

I don't want too much of a following. I write this stuff for the 3 or 5 people who care what I personally have to think, and I've let some stupidity get in the way of that. So here's what the past several months have been like:

It's been nearly half a year. In that time, I began a job as an RE, resumed my job at the Globe, visited Washington D.C., hosted a radio election night show, interviewed Sarah Koenig, John Rafferty, Josh Shapiro and Diane Rehm, and no doubt have done some other things I'm forgetting.

I feel like it's my senior year again, you know? Running a thousand miles and hour and everything at once feels like it's on fire. And if I've learned anything this semester, it's that it's completely okay to have everything be on fire, as long as you yourself are not actively on fire.

What I mean by that: your grades don't have to be stellar, you don't have to be producing the best journalistic work of your life, you don't have to be producing a lot of journalistic work at once as long as you can keep yourself going. As long as you can keep yourself able to do that work.

I've also been in the process of transitioning myself and the Globe around me for the new semester. I have an incredibly tough act to follow in Josh Croup. He's made a good person to shadow but the expectations with an all-star staff have produced something unlike anything I've hoped to see.

This past Monday was the last layout meeting of the Chief Josh Croup era. And sure, people were sad and moping but I was sitting in the corner uneasy for what this next year holds.

You see, I'm an incredibly nervous person - not for any particular reason, it's just within my countenance to be so. I'm incredibly confident in the staff I've assembled and I think they're going to do a bang-up job bringing enthusiasm and grace to this paper. But there are unspoken pressures that we work through: in 50 years we've never once unintentionally missed an issue. More than half of my section editing team have not been section editors before.

That all said, I need only look a year back - there was no way in hell I should have been a news editor. A freshman? Come on. Let alone Editor-Elect. But I got there because I decided to take on a challenge. And I feel like if nothing else, that's what I can bring to the table here: don't psych yourself out because of a challenge looming ahead.

Reading that back it sounds awfully prophetic and deep, but the universality of the statement holds. Either that, or the fact I'm running on like 4 hours of sleep is getting to me.

I have no business being here, but honestly who ever does? I presented my relatively finalized portfolio - alexanderpopichak.com (yes that is a thing) - to my class and I surprised myself at the sheer volume and variety of work that I've done. I think the best thing to do in a situation is to not think too much about the perspective of that data point - what do I mean? Here:

Imagine you're afraid of heights. You're on a vacation with your family and they want to go to, I don't know, some mountain somewhere. You want to tell them no because of the whole heights thing, but at the same time you can't easily get out of this one. So what do you do? You just start driving. If you think too much about where you are in relation to the top of the mountain you may lose focus driving or you may stop - all bad ideas climbing a mountain. And eventually you make it to the top or some stopping point and you look around and it's beautiful - just don't think about the height it took to get you there.

I'm at a stopping point here - I'm not at the top of the mountain by any means and I hope I never am. I am, however, required every semester to take a break and look around.

Before me is an amazingly steep climb. I look forward to it with a slight weariness but an abundant amount of optimism, enthusiasm and excitement for what lay beyond the top.

And so this is finals week. I'm running on an average of 4 hours of sleep per night. My regrets are named procrastination and lack of published Globe work. Amongst others, my new semesters' resolution is to write more, take care of myself more and keep moving forward.

So we'll see. If I'm lazy, the next post will be either the year in review or my first letter from the editor as Editor-in-Chief. That's incredibly strange to say, by the way. Considering the amount of editors before me, that I get to do the 50th anniversary year and that I get to wear the title "Chief." I'm going to up the ante on writing simply to keep outside my own head.

My two cent clarification: In defense of Carlynton High School and Small Education

Hang on, this is going to be a long one.

A warning: the following is an opinion. As a journalist, I don’t like having those. Understand that opinions change and evolve as time does, and please respect the place I was coming from whilst writing this. Also I use Oxford commas, don’t judge me. I do not advocate for any candidate or particular legislation or anything beyond dialogue. Want that to be clear before I proceed.

So last week I shared a post from a Carlynton alum that I attached some comments to. I was under the impression that the commentary was an assessment of the district I graduated from in the aim of opening a dialogue on the faults in the education system as a whole.

Boy was I wrong.

I completely own up to sharing it, and further to misrepresenting a blanket approval from me of this statement with added commentary. I thought it was (and, full disclosure, I didn’t read the whole thing that late at night) an attempt to open dialogue and I shared to push further the reach of that dialogue. I also did it as a way to promote someone I felt at the time should be heard by my reach. I recognize that the alum can stand behind what was said as an opinion, but I want to make it clear: that opinion expressed in the piece isn’t mine.

The fact of the matter is when you share across your stage or your platforms, the assumption is that anything you further share you agree with. I need to add the whole “RTs do not equal endorsements” bit to my Twitter for this reason, but I’m not here to preach about social media, I’m here to preach about what my views are on the education system and what I meant to say originally.

I graduated two years ago from the Carlynton School District. If you’re fairly new to my adventures, the Carlynton School District is a tiny (and I mean tiny – my graduating class was 92 strong) school district five miles outside Downtown Pittsburgh. I’m currently pursuing a B.A. Journalism degree at Point Park University, a subject I consider a passion and a school I consider the best decision I’ve made.

The original alum commented on apathy at my alma mater and said quite bluntly (and quoting an unnamed source) that “this place is a disease.” I won’t argue that apathy exists within the education system but I have to argue that the source misidentified the problem. This place – being Carlynton High School – is not the disease. It has the disease that comes along with being (against its own will) a part of a governmental system that puts numbers ahead of people and tests ahead of education.

I’ve said for years privately that the strength of the Carlynton School District lies in its faculty and students. Teachers (and I’m dear friends with some education majors, I count them here also) don’t get into such a cutthroat business without a passion or a drive to accomplish something greater. It’s a drive to change what they experienced, or to provide something greater than themselves to their students. If you don’t have a drive to change it or to affect some sort of change, you’re not going to last in education long. You. Burn. Out.

I want to challenge the original poster to think about what honestly was said: was the lack of challenge you described you had experienced your senior year a result of climbing an academic pinnacle as I had, or was it because of a chosen apathy on the part of the participant? You said you chose against taking Advanced Placement yet expected the same level challenge at a general level class, what did you expect? I am genuinely curious.

I’m not going to lie, by my senior year I wanted to get out of Carlynton but that was because by that point I felt I had outgrown it and I had a taste of the real world and college life and wanted to move forward beyond the K-12 system. It’s a system that I strongly believe is designed that way for a reason so you can make a clean cut when you walk across that stage and be ready mentally to take on the next step, whatever you determined that to be.

If I didn’t feel challenged in the classroom, I did this potentially self-destructive thing I do in college where I get CRAZY involved with stuff to challenge me further in a way outside the classroom and to challenge the ways I think and the means by which I communicate. I’m not saying it’s the best way of doing things, but I will say that the challenges I didn’t find in a classroom I found elsewhere through in-class resources.

I want to step back for a moment and talk about resources. Carlynton doesn’t have many because, well, it’s tiny and is not the wealthiest district. But isn’t that a shame to say? I mean, seriously. Should size even matter when you talk about resources for students? Why does the per-student cost to educate vary from district to district and why should resources be tied to standardized testing?

Further, why are we allocating resources with preference to certain groups? It’s a television trope to have schools buy new equipment every year for a football team while the band uses decades-old instruments. I’m not saying that is true within Carlynton, but I have heard stories along these lines at other schools.

Also, why is the education system still structured in the way it was during the Enlightenment where local government meant something? It makes NO sense to penalize a district’s funding because of standardized test results, frankly those that struggle should be given MORE resources to bring them up to speed in my humble opinion.

Single A designation should not be a death sentence, nor should it inspire any sort of victim situation. It doesn’t at Carlynton (with the only exception I can think of being an oddly specific school board meeting in 2013 or 2014 where the justification by the superintendent for class scheduling problems was “well, we’re a single-A school, you’re lucky you get to have electives) but I know it’s true in some other districts. Being small means more individualized and community-based education.

Parents pick a school for its resources, and I’m proud to say my family found a district whose nonphysical resources (teachers, programs, etc.) are incredibly abundant. We have fall plays and spring musicals and 19 sports. How could a school of less than a thousand do it except by having people who care and others who can stretch a dollar?

Am I saying Carlynton fell behind? No.

What I am saying is that as a whole the education system has fallen behind. Money that could have gone towards offering unique electives and challenging students’ ways of thinking is instead going toward mandated remediation on testing, diagnostic programs, and compliance with further regulated yet seemingly innumerable and indistinguishable revenue-sucking mandates. It’s not the Carlynton School Board or the principal deciding this, it’s someone at the federal and state level telling these people they have to.

Do you know how often I was given diagnostic testing ahead of the Keystone or PSSA exams? Nearly monthly. Imagine, that’s at least 10 days outside of the classroom every year. Don’t forget, several of these tests were multi-day, and you had to do some sort of buildup prep to the diagnostics, and then the build up to those tests...

This testing obsession is classroom time spent chasing your tail in an effort to save the school that you’re being set aside from. It’s circular and so, so wrong. And let’s not forget those diagnostic tests are expensive to use, and could go to, I don’t know, journalism books, or psychology books?

So where am I going with this? It’s no myth that the education system is broken (at least by my assessment) but it is a myth that the individual district is to blame. Do you feel trapped? Good, it’s the system that got you to the point where you can realize it. Challenge that system.

I was reminded recently that the successes I’ve had and the career I’ve chosen didn’t come from the classroom. I never once took a journalism class, and it wasn’t for lack of trying either. The teacher of the journalism course did pull me aside at one point and told me I wouldn’t have benefitted from the curriculum. Why? In part, it was out of date books and a lack of resources to do real journalism. But at the end of the day, it’s important to remember this positive: my love of radio stemmed from a gifted education teacher passing along the information for a program at WYEP.

Yeah, Carlynton didn’t teach me a lede from a nut graph but can you seriously blame the high school for that? There should be no reasonable expectation that every profession should have an offered elective that prepares you for that individual, specialized profession. It’s unreasonable.

What Carlynton did offer me was the access to that gifted teacher who shared the WYEP project, or to that band director who let me try my hand at announcing, or that English teacher who (and I still don’t understand how this happened) let me run a newspaper as a high school senior or the drama teacher who rescued me from hating theater after a bad experience and let me anchor the TV morning announcements after being a technical director there, and I could go on but hopefully you get the point.

Was I saying to myself junior year “dang I wish I could drop out and move on to college”? Of course. What teenager wants to be a cog in a politicized state-level machine that hasn’t been working well?

But why do you stick around? Two key reasons in my case: because your end goal is a diploma so you can keep moving on to that liberal arts school in the city, and you stay out of respect for how you came to that conclusion.

The reason you want to leave high school in the first place is because you discovered the ‘real world’ a teacher on the inside helped share with you. In other words, you can’t realistically wish to be a part of a different world if you had never heard of that other world in the first place.

So what was draining about Carlynton? The public school system. The helplessness you feel on a daily basis where the decisions are made for you in either a board meeting or some faraway marble castle in Harrisburg. It’s not some sort of deeply engrained lackadaisical work ethic in the teachers or administrative support staff, it’s an apathy at the extreme top that trickles its way down to resources at the feet of those who truly care.

If Carlynton didn’t challenge you, it’s you that failed. Not because it was supposed to consistently hit you with ridiculous workloads or whatever effort you expected of it but because you didn’t seek more. In the real world, people don’t work with you or for you. You have to seek out your own challenges or support for what it is you’re trying to do.

It’s a lesson I feel this alum missed. By choosing to enter and remain in this supposedly toxic environment (read: it isn’t) then complaining afterwards it didn’t help you, apparently you hadn’t sought those challenges out through the system? I don’t know, I can only guess your position, but from mine I feel like there is some action on the participant’s part that is missing here.

I know this much, however: the reason I got where I am is I sought out and sucked up every opportunity I could inside and outside the classroom. There isn’t any professor who asks you to become Editor-in-Chief of your campus newspaper your freshman year. It’s Josh Croup and your friends who you’ve surrounded yourself with who convince you to take that leap. It’s the professor who tells you you shouldn’t be doing it.

This is probably the longest post I’ve written in a long while but I wanted to make this incredibly clear: I can’t endorse the notion that Carlynton is some sort of wretched wasteland where dreams go to die or whatever yarn that you want to spin. It’s a wonderful place where teachers do the best they can with what they have. It’s a place where you have to find your own path because that’s how the real world works. It’s a place where you have to seek a challenge, you can’t expect it to be served to you because that’s not how the world works.

If there’s a problem, it’s the lack of resources allotted to these base-level programs because of a flawed administrative/governmental system. I’m not endorsing anarchy, I just want to start a responsible dialogue. Comment if you’d like, I only delete straight profanity.

When we were younger oh, oh, we did enough

As I write this I'm somewhere in east-central Pennsylvania travelling to New York City for some sort of college newspaper conference. We somehow convinced the university (who is handling the bill for this venture) to let us [being my editor and I] travel to NYC by train, My guess is that it was comparable pricing, plus a professor recommended it. 

So, I'm writing this from the relative comfort of the 42 Pennsylvanian. Taking a nearly 9 hour train ride leaves a lot of time for window-watching and reflecting. So often in life we're given opportunities to do amazing things - cover a presidential rally, head to New York City, cover the bicentennial of your city - that we focus on those things. The accomplishments, the clips, the resume lines, all that fancy jazz that we're trained to give value to. And there's something to be said for that, but still, and it's cliche to say but it'd be nice to not focus on the destination.

I've always been fascinated with road trips, and trains in particular. I don't particularly understand why, but I've begun to realize some things through this venture. 

Railways are continuous by design. They don't turn and wind as much as roadways can afford to, and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. Towns aren't built around railways anymore, they're built around exits, creating that uniform artificiality that surrounds a stop - that gas station that serves the food, that hotel that's there, and some sort of attraction. 

Railways are unblinking - you see the shiny and new bastions of industry, the windmills, the rolling hills, the Civil War era Main Streets, and, most fascinating to me, the dilapidated and the abandoned. 

Graphs are made by connecting points. Individual, dotted, unmoving points. The same applies to railways - the stops are little burgs and villes and sometimes larger cities, but for some reason someone decided to connect them directly. 

The train I'm taking, the 42 Pennsylvanian, is the most direct route from Pittsburgh to New York. It goes via Greensburg, Latrobe, Altoona, Harrisburg, Elizabethtown, Philly, and some places I'm no doubt forgetting. Those are the points - large and small - that are connected. The stations are placed by necessity - sometimes in an offbeat place with a small shelter and other times a block from the Pennsylvania State Capitol building

It's rare anymore that people have the time to talk extensively about the things they work on, but more specifically how they got there. You hear the story about a presidential candidate speaking but what you're missing is the story of how your press credentials were sent to a spam folder or how you followed a random camera guy and next thing you know you're in a private tour given by the mayor and the CEO of the history center. 

Those stories - those anecdotes on how you got the story - are fascinating in their own rite but you don't hear them because all to often you only have time to tell the one, largest story. So you do it and you move on.

I covered a Bernie Sanders rally last week, and it was amazing. Who ever thought that this freshman would get press credentials to cover a major political candidate? That deserves its own post, but the short of it is, I asked and was granted. 

I'm living this wild and crazy life I never expected to be able to be living this early on, but here I am doing it. It's an exhausting and exhilarating life to lead. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to resume staring out at the world now. 

Sheets are swaying from an old clothesline

The title comes from a song by Radical Face called, quite appropriately, "Welcome Home." I say appropriately for the point in my life right now, not necessarily the song, though I'm fairly sure that's probably appropriate too. I'm just looking for how that is.

Last year around this time I was talking about that dreaded in between place - where stuff was ending like crazy and I was, in a word, unsatisfied. I was longing for something - I guess I wasn't sure exactly what that something was, but I knew it wasn't where I was at that point. I realize now, looking back, that I was sick and tired of living my life in this mock-reality. I guess I'd liken it to when you get something shiny and metallic and they always have that cellophane wrap on it. It's pointless outside of preserving the underneath from dust, and it looks dumb and tempts you to rip it off.

You know full well the implications of ripping that cellophane layer: the shiny outside dulls after a while and that newness can never fully be recaptured. But frankly, you didn't buy that fancy stainless steel refrigerator to look at - you bought it to put your leftovers in. You bought it to be used.

I can't say that fits perfectly to my whole graduation thing, but I feel like so many people are so afraid to rip off that cellophane layer - to cut their ties and such - that they stay there in that general orbit. It's not because they want to or intend to, it's because they're afraid to loose that protected shine. I'm here to tell you that's a load of nonsense.

A few weeks back I covered the bicentennial of the incorporation of the City of Pittsburgh, and felt like a real live journalist for the first time. I was asked the question "are you with the media?" and after a moments' confusion (hey, I'm still new at this guys. I can write well, I'm still working out the gathering part...) I responded affirmatively and was promptly handed a press kit. I interviewed councilman Corey O'Connor and President/CEO of the Heinz History Center Andy Masich, and I stood throughout the press conference, listening to the Mayor and other dignitaries. If you're interested in the story it all resulted in, check it out here: http://www.pointparkglobe.com/news/view.php/1018577/City-celebrates-birthday UPDATED LINK: http://ppuglobe.com/2016/06/city-celebrates-birthday/

Maybe someday I'll tell you about what happened after the official celebration and how I ended up in the right place at a wrong time...

Life is fantastic where I'm at. I'm in the midst of a bunch of things: this Saturday is the United Student Government (USG)'s Pioneer Community Day (PCD). I've been working alongside some USG members in some capacity since January coordinating volunteers and such for this event. I'm exhausted but SO PUMPED to get this going!

I'm sitting in the basement of the University Center on campus hiding from life to focus on some personal admin work I've been meaning to do: write this blog, stare into oblivion, deep stuff like that. I'm sitting in a nondescript corner having just gotten off the phone with an organizer in Maine for the Bernie Sanders Campaign trying to get media credentials for the Globe for the Sanders rally Thursday. (Fingers Crossed!) This Saturday is PCD. We put together a Globe yesterday, I'll be delivering an issue tomorrow. A week from Thursday I'm headed with the Editor of the Globe (Josh Croup) to New York City for a Newspaper Editors' conference.

Sure it's weird to be at the end of so many things as I was last year. It's so much better to be on the other side, exhausted from being in the midst of so many things. 

So what have I been up to in the meantime?

My last update was a little over a month ago: http://2015blogger.blogspot.com/2016/02/its-different-kind-of-danger.html

• I went to see Point Park's version of The Drowsy Chaperone
• Visited my house for once.
• I covered the Pittsburgh Incorporation Bicentennial Celebration
• I was tonsured a Reader in the Orthodox Church by His Grace, Bishop Daniel when he visited Slickville a week and a half ago
• I saw the Spring Standards again because when the Spring Standards come to town you go. period.
• Played radio. WANNA HEAR ON THE HORIZON?? We now have a YOUTUBE page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnoxP4T2p66dpWkpmWmDgqA/

On First Reference: To Write Home About

I'm beginning to understand a phrase I use sometimes: "nothing to write home about." It turns out I've been misusing it all these years.

I used to use the phrase to mean nothing notable had happened. While this is still true, it's not entirely true. Since moving on campus, I've noticed that my reports back home have to be short. As a journalism major, I've learned how to identify key figures in a story and give minimal background. These combine, and I find I end up cutting people out because first reference requires background.

As a result, there are a lot of amazing people who live on my floor and such that I interact on a daily basis with that I can't reference to other people without a lengthy explanation. I find that the best I can do is for each person give two adjectives to describe them best. Several come to mind: Talented, Creative, Beautiful in Every Way, Knightly, Business-Savvy, and the list goes on.

Anyway, these are people I absolutely love having in my life but without a lengthy explanation couldn't rightly explain who they were. So to anyone concerned about me, yes I have made friends.

Things move extremely fast here, mainly because (though I jokingly said this in high school) I actually live here. I can meet with people on the same day I first contact them, and have (Mondays are famous for this) several meetings in a day.

THE CLUB, an initiative where I am part of the development team, is going pretty well.

I have a show with two other people on WPPJ (670AM on campus, or wppjradio.com or on the TuneIn App). The concept is called Sixty-Forty, and it consists of 60% music and 40% talk. And you can call in if you're crazy enough. Anyway, it airs every Friday from 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. and you should totally listen.

I am a staff writer with The Globe and as I talked about in my last post here I'm really loving working for them. Having the title "Staff Writer" is pretty awesome, even if it was a typo in the last edition.

I am still loving working for the Post-Gazette, which has become a more entertaining venture than I figured. I work 9 p.m. - midnight on Fridays (which explains why I'm still up to a degree). Who appears in the cube across from me but my Journalism 150 (Journalistic Writing and Editing) professor. He apparently does this just for fun, to keep his foot in the door, and I got to talking to him during a lull about his background. He started at a community newspaper and at one point was working at USA Today before starting his own newspaper. A rather dumb business fluke caused the downfall of the paper, so now he teaches.

As we're waiting for the T to come, who appears behind us but my Journalism 101 professor - the reason I have the job. There I was, surrounded by faculty working for the same institution, and by this I mean the Post-Gazette, not Point Park. Which, I might add, is probably the best decision I've made probably ever. Let's see where this goes.

This has been a wild ride so far, and I'm so excited to just keep doing it all, to just keep living in the end. Ride along, will you?

Let's Make Mistakes for a While

So this is a very overdue life update. Like most overdue things, it's going to be frantically thrown together and sorta clunkily large. Clunkily is not a word.

Let's start in order. I'm involved with the Globe, which is the campus newspaper. I've written 4 pieces (three have been published - each on the front page - and I'm waiting for Wednesday to roll around for the most recent piece) for them and I'm finding I'm not too terrible at this writing thing. Just not here. If you want to read everything in order from the beginning (a piece on USG - before I joined USG), look here: http://www.pointparkglobe.com/news/?s=Popichak

I was elected to the United Student Government here as the freshman representative for the school of communication, and I serve on the communication committee headed by my RE Emily (who is also USG's Press Secretary). Our first meeting? Budgets. Just my luck. USG is full of great people, and I can tell we are going to make positive changes in the PPU community.

I'm working with my friends Amber and Elise on a weekly radio show that debuts this coming Friday (9/25) on WPPJ. We're calling it Sixty Forty, because it's going to be 60% music and 40% not music. It's like half and half but with more music. Want to hear us play stuff? Download the TuneIn App or visit the WPPJ website here: wppjradio.com or this direct link: http://tunein.com/radio/WPPJ-s12994/

I'm also in real live print journalism! Kinda. I was hired as a freelance sports stringer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. On Friday nights I go to the PG's north shore offices and answer phones for two hours or so taking high school football summaries. It's a paid gig and I've found that it's really fun. And I also like high school football, so this is a good way of staying connected without being that alumnus that goes back to all the games.

Those are the major developments in my life at this point. People are fantastic here, and the professors are also pretty great. I've been keeping in touch with the people back home to a decent degree, but it's a bit hard. We're in our own little world here at Point Park - directly connected to the real world of Pittsburgh.