Why I want to be a journalist

Last semester, Jacqui Banaszynski came to my Cross Cultural Journalism class and gave a lecture on her Pulitzer award winning series, "AIDS in the Heartland." I was fascinated. I could have listened to her talk all day. And then she said something that I scrambled to write down because I knew it was exactly why I feel pulled to be a journalist:

"We all start out the same way, and then life happens. One of the great powers of journalism is to record that. There is no such thing as 'the other.' It's more important to write about the sameness than the things that divide us."

That says it all.