Panisara (Por) Jaijongkit

2023 is the year where I will be spending all of it in journalism graduate school, so I thought I would take a minute to reflect on how I ended up here in the first place.

There’s video footage of me in the second grade saying—with the smuggest tone and expression you can imagine from a second grader—that I wanted to be an author. So I fell in love with writing sometime before that. I don’t think I can pinpoint a specific moment. I just remember typing up the words to movies I loved on my dad’s grey Dell laptop, and scribbling Home Alone and Barbie movie ripoffs in my notebooks.

Journalism wasn’t even a consideration until the sixth grade. I thought it sounded like a good idea. A way to write and make money? Can’t be as fun as being a fiction writer, but perhaps an option nonetheless.

My school didn’t have a student newspaper until I was a high school junior. Joining that was a no-brainer, especially in an attempt to give this journalist thing a shot. I covered school events. And I hated it. I had no motivation to write about anything or to go out and do some reporting. So I figured journalism wasn’t right for me and steered myself to creative fiction writing for college.

I didn’t consider journalism again until my senior year of college. My parents didn’t care what I studied, as long as I at least had a master’s degree. So I had to figure out what I wanted to study. I knew I wanted to do some more writing. But I also didn’t want an MFA. As much as I loved writing fiction, I didn’t think it to be an economically sustainable writing path unless I got really, really lucky.

I tried SEO and hated it with every fiber of my being. Copywriting was okay, but it never gave me the same creative satisfaction. I took a creative non-fiction class my last semester of college that made me write a feature piece and I liked it. Maybe there was hope.

So I looked at journalism again.

Even though I couldn’t find passion for it when I was younger, maybe something changed. Maybe I found more purpose, a topic I wanted to read and think and learn more about on a daily basis.

I should’ve seen my academic interest in environmental science coming. My favorite game as a kid was called Jumpstart Explorers where you played as different animals to learn their role in the ecosystem: as a hermit crab looking for shells, as ant eaters transporting leaves to cultivate in their nest, as birds eating ticks off wildebeests. It was fun, and all the little songs in the game are core memories.

After taking environmental science courses in late high school and later college, I realized this was it. This was the subject to accompany my writing. It was a topic that came easily to me because I was drawn to how everything was connected. Eventually, I took on environmental science as a second major.

I went around looking for environmental reporting programs. One traumatic GRE and some grad school applications later, I found myself heading off to the University of Colorado Boulder.

After finishing my first semester, I was delighted to find that I loved my classes. As nervous (and awkward) as I was approaching strangers, I felt proud of my work. Completely changing the type of writing I had to do was challenging, but it also felt like a whole new genre of writing for me to explore. Breaking news writing, headlines, longer features, audio scripts. I picked up a professional camera for the first time. And after spending half an hour afraid I was going to break it, took my first photos for my own story. It was a rush of creative energy that I’ve never felt working with fiction.

As of this reflection, I’m not sure of I’m willing to go for a traditional journalism career. There are some things I want to do with journalism, but I feel like I’m getting ahead of myself. Considering a full journalism career is scary and I thought I was going to pivot to doing social media and content creation afterwards. But maybe that will change.

I’m not ready to call myself a journalist. I feel like I don’t have the reporting experience or the ability to navigate ethical reporting with delicacy (but I assume that’s what next semester’s Journalism Law and Ethics class is for) to do that. I currently don’t trust anything I write to be of decent quality without having an instructor or editor going through first. I’m still nervous of every piece having a glaring reporting flaw.

So I’ve got a long road ahead of me. The hardest part is that I’m unable to see most of the turns. And I’m sure they’ll be additional roads and routes that will pop into view as I go by. Perhaps they’ll be traversable. If I’m lucky, I’ll know when I reach those forks.

I’m not good at New Year resolutions, but there are some things I want to remind myself to keep on track for this year. So here they are, in no particular order:

• Reading more books! At the very least, I want to get to Iron Widow and The Overstory for fiction; Saving Us and The Anthropocene Reviewed for non-fiction.
• A summer internship! Preferably something closer to traditional journalism versus a social media/communications one.
• Keeping up with environmental news in Thailand. The pre-reporting has to start somewhere!
• And the most ambitious one: a rough draft of my current fantasy novel!

So hello 2023, and here’s hoping for the best!