Sophomore Mattie Baker started her writing journey as a reporter. After taking Introduction to Publications, she signed up to be on the Mountain Echo staff.

She and her dad have been writing a joint story for a while. He’ll do a chapter and then she will do a chapter, and they just keep doing that, back and forth.

“It’s just a form of bonding for me and my dad, and I think that it’s just really something special,” Baker said.

Before Baker was born, her father planned to go to Florida with a movie script he wrote with one of his friends. They had a meeting set up and were planning to sell it. He ended up not going because her mother wanted to start a family, so they stayed in Altoona. They knew if they went with the movie script they wouldn’t have the opportunity to start a family.

“I just feel sad that he never got to do it,” Baker said. “I feel like if I carry on, with the writing, then it’ll be better. And give him an opportunity to still experience some of what he wanted to.”

She wants to continue on her dad’s writing journey through her own, but she knows for a future job she won’t be sticking as a reporter but instead wants to be an author or to do storyboards. Storyboards are created by artists who make the plot line of a story or movie visually.

“I don’t know if that would be my main job because I guess it would depend on how successful I was as an author. But I’d also like to do something in art. I just think that a lot of the storyboard that you see is super cool, and I’ve always really felt that that was just interesting. Even just animating a show. I think it’d be cool like just being a part of that. It would be interesting.”