On March 16, the Pennsylvania School Press Association (PSPA) held their annual High School Journalism State Finals at Penn State University. Many schools in Pennsylvania came to participate in the event, including our own.
I, along with nine other students, were able to participate in the finals due to placing high enough in our specific categories during regionals. When we arrived at Penn State, we went to the ballroom and waited for the presentation to start. The presentation covered what the community at Penn State campus is like and it definitely made me want to apply there when I’m able to.
Once the presentation was finished, we were sent to work on our submissions for the finals. I was competing in the editorial writing category, and my prompt was to write about the earlier presentation. This prompt was known by every competitor due to it being in the individual folders we were all given when we got to Penn State. However, I wasn’t aware of it since I assumed it would be similar to Regionals where we would be given our prompts when we started writing. Despite all of that, I was still able to get my editorial written with two minutes left on the clock. However, I still think it’s weird how they changed it from how it was before, and I felt like I would have done much better if it was like how it was during Regionals.
After the competition portion of finals was finished, we headed to the residence hall for lunch. The food there was decent, and there’s not much else to say about it.
Once we finished lunch, we went back to the ballroom, and every student there was divided into 20 groups for a trivia game about various journalism topics. Unfortunately, the QR codes given out led to the answer key instead of the link for the game. After that was fixed we were able to start the trivia, my team did not end up winning but at least we were able to get into the top five.
At the second-to-last event of the day, we got to see a presentation about how to promote our schools on social media. Methods such as following trends on time and knowing your current audience and your target audience were discussed. It provided a lot of good information, and I’ll try to make use of it in the future.
Finally we reached the part of the day that everyone was waiting for, the awards. Sadly, I didn’t win an award for the editorial writing category, but that was to be expected after my earlier mishap, and our school still brought home four awards anyways. Junior Adrian Pacifico won the award for caption writing, senior Mattie Baker won the award for editorial cartoon, Andrew Neely won the administrator of the year award and the Mountain Echo was given the Keystone Gold award.
Overall, the PSPA state finals was a great experience that I learned a lot from. I hope that I will be able to participate in it again next year and maybe even win an award.
