My name is Cadence Schapker, I’m 17 and a rising senior at Clarke Central High School here in Athens, Georgia. I was born in Bremerton, Washington in 2005 and lived in Terre Haut, Indiana until the summer before my first grade year when I moved to Athens. Since then, I’ve lived and grown up in Athens with my parents and have gone to school in the Clarke County School system.
In my eighth grade year, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, I took part in Clarke Middle Schools first ever journalism class. It was a bit thrown together, but since I developed an interest in the high schools journalism program, ODYSSEY, I figured it would be good to develop a background on the subject. I really enjoyed my first few weeks in the class before the world shut down.
Fast forward to my freshman year and I’m sitting in a Zoom meeting with a rather intimidating teacher and about 20 to 25 kids I both recognized and had never met. I was pretty timid that first year because there was no way to hold a normal conversation through a computer, but over time I got the hang of the whole journalism thing and decided I’d stick with the program through my senior year.
Over these three years, I developed more interest in hard news, made incredible friends and developed leadership skills I never would have honed without the experiences that journalism exposed me to. From self and peer editing, to presenting, I was introduced to a new version of myself that was more self assured and more confident in leading her peers and underclassmen.
Now, I especially love engaging audiences through media besides writing and exploring different story telling strategies. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy writing, but in a day and age where visual and interactive media is an everyday encounter, it’s more refreshing and fun to experiment with different ways to convey a message or a story, especially stories about people.
More recently, I’ve also realized how much I love talking to people, even as a more introverted person. I love interviewing and getting to know people and what they want to talk about, as it opens my eyes to other perspectives, people and experiences.
As for something more interesting about me as a person, I consider myself a cat person. Over the years my family has accumulated three cats: Drake, Sammy and Elton. Drake is our oldest at 11 years old and we adopted him from a pet store. Sammy was a feral stray with no real age attached, and Elton was born in our home about three years ago as the kitten of a pregnant stray my family took in.
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