Nerding out for senior year

Call me a nerd but I really, really love learning. Back in my first blog post of the semester, one of my goals was to embrace all the learning opportunities I am lucky enough to have at my disposal at a USC student. I wanted to soak up all the information that I could in my last semester of college.

Admittedly, I haven’t been as much of a sponge as I should have been all semester. To the potential dismay of my professors (if any of them are reading this, I’m sorry) this semester it was harder than ever to avoid sinking deep into, not only a mid-semester slump, but more like a sinkhole full of quicksand.

Even my editors at the Daily Trojan are probably chuckling (or maybe shaking their heads in frustration) about how I’ve made use of every second before my deadline — and by that I mean a disproportional amount of the last remaining seconds.

They say that in college you can have two of three things: sleep, a social life or good grades. For four years I’d say I did a pretty good job of balancing the three-way scale, but in the last month or so, it’s been a struggle to say the least. Today, though, was one of the days when I snapped out of this funk and completely nerded out.

I started off the day in the Annenberg Media Center. My pre-graduation nostalgia was in full force. Amid the hustle and bustle of the newsroom I took a step back and the time to appreciate how lucky I was to be in such an impressive arena with so many resources at my disposal.

I’d like to think it’s a good sign for my future in journalism, but I ask a lot of questions. As I completed my video project in one the edit bays of the Media Center, I couldn’t help but reflect on how appreciative I was that there were at least a dozen people that I could pull aside and ask questions — that I was in a place where the sole purpose was to learn new skills and strategies.

After that little wave of appreciation and nostalgia, I headed to class where we were fortunate enough to have Fox sports reporter Laura Okmin as a guest speaker. Despite the fact that I walked into class with a million other things on my mind — a job interview later that day, assignments I had due, a story I had to finish up before a meeting with my professor that afternoon — I immediately felt locked into the discussion that she led about both issues facing young people as they break into their careers and women in the media. As she spoke about how confidence has been her key to success in gaining the respect of athletes, coaches and other sports commentators, I left the lecture feeling as though I had grasped onto something I could strive to emulate in my own life.

Feeling engaged and inspired, I headed to to an Annenberg event with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas right after class. My friend and I gushed over the fact that we were in the same room as someone as accomplished as Vargas — an undocumented immigrant who has told the stories of thousands of immigrants like him, and has dissected how we approach issues of race and ethnicity in America.

Later, I met with a professor and we spoke at length about not only the progress I had made on my final project, but also the future of journalism and public policy fields. It’s days like today where I am thankful to be so passionate about what I’m learning, and be lucky enough to have so many valuable resources at USC.

Emily Goldberg is a senior majoring in print and digital journalism. Her blog column, Diaries of a Second-Semester Senior, runs every Thursday.