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Nice to meet you, Orangeville

September 29, 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Avery Park

Hi everyone!

I guess I should introduce myself, my name is Avery Park, and I will be a co-op student here at the Citizen until the end of January.

I have lived here in Orangeville for as long as I can remember. My mom, dad and I moved here when my younger sister was born. My mom had grown up in Orangeville and she felt it was a perfect place for her to raise her kids.

While going to school at Westside Secondary, I have thought a lot about where I will be going in the next few years, the main focus being post-secondary education. I am hoping my experience here at the Citizen will make my decisions a lot easier in the future.

I am currently in grade 12, and have had a lot of wonderful experiences at Westside. I’ve made memories that will stay with me forever.

In grade 9 I was a little shy, and didn’t meet a lot of new people, but that all changed once I joined the school volleyball team. The senior coach already knew my older cousin, in his eyes, I was a ready-made, mini replacement.

My coach for the junior team was new, so everyone on the team had a lot of first experiences together. I have been on his team every year since then, and still love waking up bright and early for 7 a.m. practices.   

In grade 10 I decided to get more involved at school, so that year I cut off a foot length of my hair at our school’s annual Pink Day for breast cancer awareness.

If you have never heard of this, I can tell you that it is the biggest event at Westside every year.

To build up to Pink Day, we have a Pink Week, and every day more people are finding new ways to donate, and even more ways to wear pink. I bet our school could explode with the amount of pink inside it.

This was also the first year I could sign up for Link Crew, and that is something I knew I wanted to do.

These are the people who welcome everyone to Westside. They are there for anyone who is new, and they are at the grade 9 orientations every year.

It doesn’t matter who you are, you will feel included with a Link Leader there.

Another activity I got involved in was yearbook, and I started taking pictures and working on page design. I tried to get as involved with that as I could, and the following year I volunteered to work on the cover as well.

That is what leads me towards my interest in journalism.

I started writing more and learning about everything that happened within my school, and I really liked it. Although I did enjoy it, I still needed to test this, to see if I could actually pursue it.

My test: last April, some people from my school took a trip to Europe for the 100th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge, including me. It was the most amazing experience I have ever had, so I decided to write about it in a journal.

At the end of the day, when we were in our hotel rooms getting ready for bed, I would write about what happened that day. I would write, and write, and write… right up until my roommate told me to go to bed.

If I didn’t finish my five or more pages that night, I would continue it on bus rides, subway trips – pretty much anywhere I could sit and write.

After that trip I knew I wanted to do this, and could continue this somewhere. That made up my mind, I had to take a co-op somewhere and see what this is like in the real world.

The Citizen is the perfect place for me to learn more about this type of work and introduce myself to the types of situations I could encounter in the future.

I feel this will be an exciting couple of months for me, and I look forward to meeting new people, and trying new things I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do before.

I can be contacted at apark@new.citizen.on.ca.

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