Story by Nikki Sawyer. Edited by Tamiracle Williams.
Andrea Perez is a master’s student studying Journalism and Media Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg (USFSP). Perez was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She moved to the Florida not too long ago to further her education.
Perez has had a passion for writing and telling stories ever since she was a little girl. However, being a journalist was not always in her life plan. Book publishing was Perez’s original career path, but in high school she noticed the difficulties of this industry. Meanwhile, newspapers and journalism sparked her interest.
Most teenagers do not spend time reading newspapers, but Perez was different. She spent countless hours reading newspaper in her free time.
“I found that giving out stories for people to learn about their communities and things that are going on in society was really important,” she said.
Perez had already unveiled her love for community journalism. Next, was to get herself into the field and start working on becoming a professional journalist. Her journalistic journey started years ago in high school. While attending high school she began taking photographs for the school’s yearbook.
“That was a type of photojournalism [to me],” she said.
Doing work for the school’s yearbook was nice and fulfilling at the time, but that was just the start of Perez’s journalism career . Once completing high school, Perez found herself at Universidad del Sagrado Corazon in San Juan, studying journalism. There, she worked with various publications covering different campus activities.
Perez’s passion continued to grow more and more. Taking photos and learning how to be a journalist from her classes simply was not enough for the twenty-three year old. On her own merit, she decided she needed to do more creatively as a journalist and let her unique passion bloom.
At university, she developed an online news blog for students on campus called “La Bicicleta.”
“It actually started with the big question. – Why don’t we have a news blog as students who practice journalism?” she said. “So, me and another group of people started asking for permission [to create one].”
“We had many hours of trying to figure out how we can make it happen. It was very difficult; we took almost two years to actually make it an official website for our campus,” she said. “It was a great experience for us and for other students [who] wanted to [practice] journalism on campus.”
While the blog is a passion project of hers, photography and journalism are even larger passions. Perez is experienced and skilled behind the lens, but doesn’t consider herself to be an expert.
“I am highly interested in journalism and even though I know the basics, I want to get better at it because I really love photojournalism,” she said.
Unlike other students in the USFSP’s journalism programs , Perez said the most she has done is interviewing.
“I’d say that I’m really good at getting that information and building a solid relationship with whoever it is that I’m interviewing for my story,” she said.
Another keen interest for Perez is documentaries. While she lacks in experience, she is really looking forward to learning more about them.
Tentatively, Perez would enjoy learning more about community journalism and engaging in the Midtown (St. Petersburg) community. She said the community aspect of journalism is mainly why she selected this master’s program above many, many others.
“What I would want to be able to actually do and complete is to go back to Puerto Rico and create a sort of news blog for students, special aid for students that don’t really have the benefits and opportunities to go and do internships with local news agencies, because that’s really difficult to do in Puerto Rico,” she said.
Luckily, Perez has faced no challenges in her work with NNB thus far. Her first assignment went swimmingly, with the exception of some pesky clouds getting in the way of her camera lens. She’s interested in learning more about a project in which students worked with Academy Prep to test local tap water for the presence of lead and seeing how she can contribute to it.