Some people start their careers with a big hit; I did not because my first internship article was a fiasco.  That article has been haunting me like a ghost, one that could be likened to a crawling baby who stumbled while attempting to take his first step. 

The problem with my first article was this: I wrote an essay about Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a couple of semesters earlier. What I did was that I was trying to turn that essay into an article, but it didn’t work.

My illusion was that by using the essay as a short court to produce an article, it would be easier that way to write my first article assignment for my internship. It was a bad idea. The notion of using the essay was a miscalculation because an essay and an article have nothing in common.

The editor sent the article back to me for lack of journalistic structures. Ironically, that setback was the spark I needed to ignite my writing know-how.  This time, I wrote this article: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/school-shooting-in-the-united-states   It was titled “School shooting” because it was the year 2015 when shooting and crimes were raging in schools, colleges and universities throughout the United States.

This time, it was a total success. The Odyssey Online Magazine informed me via email that my article was live. The excitement I felt upon receiving the good news about my article was that of someone who had just published a book that made it to the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Ah! Having something published worldwide for the first time, with English being my third language, is an exhilarating experience.  Frankly, I couldn’t contain my euphoria.  As an intern, I was no different from a baby who, happily, took the first step in his life. That first step was all I needed in my journalism career to make successive ones until some day I’ll gain enough balance to run like a cheetah. 

The lesson I learned from my first article was that applying the precept of journalism to the practical World Wide Web was not an easy task.  As a journalism student, I had not yet acquired then the necessary skills to connect for the first time the bits and pieces together to achieve a final product.  I was eager to write my first article, but at the same time I was too panicky to do it.

As in any field of knowledge, people often make mistakes.  I did as well, but I can say that my first article reinforced my resolve, I regained my self-confidence and from then on, I applied every rule of journalism to write to the satisfaction of my editors and my readers.

Now I can proudly look back and say: what a difference three years of writing have made! Also, retrospectively, what a difference The Odyssey Online Magazine has made in me!  But like a crawing baby, I stumbled trying to make my first steps, and the consecutive ones I have left to make in my endeavor are endless.

Those steps are part of a journey into the unknown, one that expands beyond the horizon that seems lost in the thick clouds of the firmament to finally find myself some day at the pinnacle of my journalism career.  After publishing 85 articles in three years, I can admit that I’ve come a long way from my first article.

“A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.” Colin Powell