Discovering Life Lessons through Mosaic Journalism

My mother would throw a fit if she knew I spent an evening during Mosaic roaming downtown, unsupervised, in the company of a homeless woman and a high-school sophomore, searching for a homeless couple. Granted, it was her fault I was doing it. She forced me to sign up. And Sophie and I really needed to get the picture of the homeless couple for her article.

Mosaic was a two-week, intensive high school journalism program in which high-schoolers live on-campus in downtown San Jose and work under the guidance of experienced editors like Joe Rodriguez, formerly of the Mercury News. The premise of the program terrified me. Working for two weeks with complete strangers? No thanks. I was inexperienced, as my school had no newspaper, and deathly afraid of embarrassing myself.

Despite my fears, I decided to take the leap and apply to scope out the journalism field. The experience turned out to be the best one of my life. Mosaic forced me out of my comfort zone and instilled the determination that defines me today. When I encountered roadblocks, such as interview scheduling issues with the owner of Porky’s SJ (one of San Jose’s prominent food trucks), I found ways around them. Instead of moving on to another potential interviewee, I set up a phone interview after the owner got off work, which resulted in an exposé of Yelp’s algorithm and how his refusal to advertise for Yelp led to a manipulation of his business’s ratings on the site--the darker side of the rise of Bay Area food trucks. Along with allowing me to publish expository articles about food trucks and Common Core, Mosaic also provided a medium to voice my opinion about the limited availability of cosmetics for women of color, a topic close to my heart.

When the two weeks were up, the only tangible thing I carried away with me was two weeks’ worth of blood, sweat, and tears immortalized in thirty copies of the Mosaic newspaper. The tenacity and bravery that Mosaic taught me, however, is infinitely more valuable than the ink on the paper.