I transferred to SF State in the winter, which was weird because usually people transfer in the fall. I was out of sync and out of sorts, but looking back so was everyone else. SF State is a commuter school. People zip in from all over the Bay Area, often before or after work. I drove from Fairfield to the train station, took a train, and then a bus. It took just about two hours door to door. Majored in English at first, with the vague goal of becoming a writer of some sort. I switched to journalism after one semester. It seemed more practical and less academic. I remember thinking in English class that we spent more time trying to get inside some dead guy’s head than talking about what made stories tick.
I had been on the staff of the Solano Community College paper (and my middle school paper) and loved it. There was something so satisfying about asking direct questions and writing direct prose. I felt like journalism offered a world of opportunity. I could write about corruption or cooking. I could cover music or medicine. Journalism would give me the tools to learn and write about anything.
I joined the print and online magazines, where I covered a lot of science/technology. I also learned how to build websites—there were no content management systems back then and we had to build it all from scratch using good old HTML and CSS. We hand-coded the whole damn SFSU online magazine. It was a total blast.
I took a ton of biology classes with the intentions of getting a minor in biology, but I came up one class short of that goal. Still, I wrote a ton of stories for print and the web, learned how to code (a bit), and took cool classes like the History of Jazz and Ancient Medicine. Good times.