I want to become a music photojournalist because I’ve never been happier than when I’m photographing one of my favorite bands. Throughout my entire life, I’ve always loved to write. Writing has been one of the constants in my life and it’s helped me express and work through some difficult emotions.

In high school, I decided to take a photography class and I discovered my passion for photography. I didn’t take many quality photos then, but that’s not really the point. I was lost for what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew some of my passions.

I decided to follow this rad music photographer, Nesrin, and slowly began realizing I wanted to take photos of musicians. Music has become a large part of my life in the past few years, and I spend most of my average day listening to music. Around this same time, I was trying to determine what major I wanted so I decided to take a ton of random classes to hopefully figure it out. I stumbled into a music history class, where I realized how much I'd love to be one of the photographers for these bands.

After realizing my passion for writing clearly was pointing me towards journalism, I decided to declare the pre-major and work until I was into the school. Now that I'm in, I've heard the scary statistic that 'only 10% of the SOJC graduates will end up in the exact career they wanted to be in.' Only I don't find the statistic that scary because I refuse to have a backup plan.

I truly believe I can accomplish my goals, so why would I ever need a backup plan? That's just preparing you for defeat, which means you won't work as hard towards your goal because you're already dooming it to fail.

I strongly believe in my goals and I think this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. It's an incredibly comforting feeling and I'll never sell that feeling to work at a backup plan job that I wouldn't like as much as my dream job. All I want out of my life is to be happy and being a music photojournalist would do exactly that.