When I first arrived at San Diego State, I was scared out of my mind. After high school, I went the community college route (shoutout to Diablo Valley College) and spent three more years living at home.
Then, after a good friend of mine started going to SDSU and sold me on it, I decided to leave my beloved hometown in the Bay Area and head south for two years of undergrad. However, I had never lived on my own before, so doing it eight hours away from home made the transition seem so drastic.
Naturally, the doubts began to set in.
“Oh God, should I really have done this?”
“How soon can I visit home?”
“What if I don’t make any friends?”
As it turns out, I didn’t make any friends here.
Instead, I got family.
Here at the DA, I’ve been able to improve so much as a journalist. Prior to coming here, I had never really done much on-camera work before. Fast forward to today and I feel more comfortable in front of a camera than ever before.
The DA has allowed me to get to places I never could have dreamed of going before.
A nationally televised bowl game in Albuquerque? Check.
Las Vegas not once, but twice for conference championships? I got to do that.
However, none of that happens without the help of people here at the DA.
This place is like the 2018 Warriors, absolutely loaded with talent.
Because I was surrounded by that talent every day, it pushed me to be better, motivated me to challenge myself. Those challenges only increased because of the pandemic, but like I told the sports section back in August of last year, there was honestly no one else I’d rather cover sports within a pandemic than them.
The sports section put out crazy good content, even when every sport here was canceled. Amazing multimedia pieces, great articles, and every single one of them were heat.
A lot of journalists are great individually, but I can honestly say that as a team, what they were able to do over this past year with everything being virtual, there are just not many groups that can do what they did.
I know that every single person in the sports section is going on to much bigger things, I’d bet the bank on that if I could.
These people had my back like no one else could, and for that, I can’t even begin to thank them enough.
Leaving this place is going to be tough. The fact that after July I won’t know the next time I can get Trujillo’s is downright terrifying.
However, what makes this goodbye especially hard is just because of how fast things went.
People say that four years go by fast. For me, I only had two, and one of those years was done staring at my computer for who knows how many hours a day.
Yet, even with online classes and meetings, I still got to go to games and actually cover things in person.
Covering these events means so much more when there are actually people who look at the coverage.
So for every person that retweeted, liked, or even just took a look at one of my pieces, thank you.
Covering sports has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember and thanks to the Daily Aztec, I’ve been able to do that.
This definitely won’t be my last step in my sports journalism career, but I’m beyond happy it was one of the first.
So thanks for everything Daily Aztec, the past two years are something I will never forget.
