Student Blog: Foot in the Door

A few years ago I wrote a song. I posted that song on Tik Tok and got a few hundred views and a decent amount of likes, but nothing crazy. The song was very personal and meant a lot to me, so I recorded it and added production elements and had it in my back pocket for a while.

In the fall semester of 2024, I took a songwriting class at my school. It was one of the scariest decisions to even sign up for it, because I knew I would be sharing my work with people, something that I was not used to doing outside of posting online. It ended up being one of my favorite classes I have ever taken, and an extremely valuable experience. It was that professor, the people in the class, and the motivation of presenting my songwriting that pushed me to release that song publicly. 

I still post my work online, but in a much more casual way, and I don’t know what the timeline is for me releasing more music. I even performed that song at a school event, and that was scarier than just being in the room while people listened to a recording of it. 

It has never been part of my dream to be a performer. Not that I don’t think I would love it, but it just doesn’t seem like the lifestyle for me. Learning to be comfortable posting my songs was a hurdle I had to jump over, and I think it’s the main one I am willing to stick with at the moment. I write songs for me, and I worry that making it bigger than that would take away that pleasure that I find in it.

To move forward in my career, I have learned that I need to start taking more risks and putting myself out there in order to get my foot in the door in the journalism industry. It’s a complicated thing. In 2026, it feels like the only way to get into the job market is to know the right people, which makes everything that much more complicated for us college students. 

I want to write about things that matter to me. I want to write about things that will matter to other people. I wrote an article about long-distance intimacy last semester that ended up feeling very cathartic and empowering, because I was able to talk about a taboo subject in my own words and on my own time. I wrote a piece about women in the music industry being put into boxes and I found that extremely interesting not only as a songwriter, but as a journalist.

There are pieces of myself in so many different careers and future paths. I only hope to be brave enough to one day take the risk that puts all of me there