Though I never took a journalism class in high school, I decided journalism must be the career for me. In my mind, journalism equated writing. I didn’t realize how much more there was to it. It wasn’t until the second semester of college that it dawned on me what journalism truly is: telling people’s stories.

That semester I was assigned to cover a men’s tennis match for the Marquette Tribune. The first tennis match I ever went to was the first one I covered for the paper. The sports editor at the time complimented my first story and asked me if I liked covering the match. When I said it wasn’t too bad, I actually kind of enjoyed it, he gave me the beat. It was a little more than I bargained for. If I had strictly focused on the sport aspect for the rest of the season, I would have been bored out of my head. Tennis is all right, but it’s not really my sport.

But while Marquette was having its best tennis season in years, I got to really know the players. I was there when Peter Mojzis won Conference USA player of the week, when the Golden Eagles pulled off a stunning upset of UNC-Charlotte, and when the two seniors played their last match at the Helfaer Tennis Stadium. I also had to write the story when the season went down in flames in the first round of the conference tournament.

Tennis isn’t about weird scoring and doubles play, it’s about Justin Holsen and Raj Gil and Kent Davies. It’s about real people. Since then, I’ve tried to make a person’s individualism shine through in every story I do.

Writing is just a medium that we use to tell stories. But a story is not a story with mere words. A story comes from finding the right people to talk to, listening, asking the right questions, observing and analyzing.

Everyone who I’ve talked to – from Incubus drummer Jose Pasillas to Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Ed Thompson – has a story to tell. Journalism is the art of effectively communicating those stories.