Last fall, Camilla O’Connell, the photo editor for both the Legend yearbook and McIntosh Trail’s photo editor, was invited to participate in the Washington Journalism and Media Conference, a  summer journalism program, hosted at George Mason University.

“I ended up just receiving a random letter in my mail one day around October [or] November last year, inviting me to it. And I wasn’t really sure about it what it was, but I did more research on it, and it seemed pretty cool.”

Finding interest in what the program seemed to be about, O’Connell was intrigued.

“I looked it up, Googled it, looked onto Instagram, and it seemed cool. But my mom was a really big on advocating for me to go, ‘Oh, this would be great for you should do this. You should do this.’ She’s been really advocating for me to go, and I’m really happy that she did.”

The week-long program focused on guest speakers, simulations, newsroom-focused leadership skills and content creation.

“One of the really cool things we did, we went to the National Press Club in D.C., and it was amazing to be able to walk in and see all the things on their walls, and who’s been there from the Washington Post. [It] was really cool to hear the different range of journalism writers, because we had people from Politico, we had people from Good Morning America. We had this whole range on how broad journalism really is.”

With O’Connell’s experience at the journalism program, her goals in journalism were solidified.

“It definitely made me learn, after hearing actual working journalists, it definitely made me way more interested in the program, fully thinking, okay, yeah, this is definitely what I want to do when I’m older.”

O’Connell said she shows interest in multimedia.

“Right now, I’m really interested in managing a sports team’s social media, that’d be a lot of fun. But I definitely want to be on the multimedia side.”