Lia Griffiths | I thought the plane was goin’ down, how’d you turn it right around?

Two years ago, I pulled off the biggest surprise of my life. My best friend Brennan had already been at Cal Poly for two years, so I secretly applied to transfer. I waited months without telling her, not wanting to get her hopes up. It was a reach school, since my mental health had taken a serious toll on my grades during my first year of community college. 

In my second year, I locked in. I worked especially hard in the statistics class that transfer applicants are required to take just to be eligible to apply. A lot of that studying happened in my least favorite place on campus, the library, where I’d sit in silence, stuck in my own head. I’d think about how far behind I felt compared to my peers, and how even if I did get into Cal Poly, I’d be two years behind the other journalism majors. 

Then, in a tearful, full-circle moment, I received my acceptance letter while in the middle of a statistics tutoring session in the library. I jumped up out of my seat and shouted the profane version of “holy smokes.” Surrounded by my classmates and the tutors who helped me tremendously, my runway was finally clear. I announced my commitment at a college reveal party with my friends and family, and surprising Brennan was positively surreal.

I found a beautiful home and housemates I can genuinely call some of my best friends. It was the perfect place to start putting down roots in San Luis Obispo. Four of us were transfers, and we quickly learned just how welcoming Cal Poly is to students like us.

I had only ever taken one journalism course, barely familiar with the inverted pyramid and other journalistic fundamentals. I was thrown into intensive, hands-on learning that catapulted me into the immersive world of news. To borrow one of Professor Richard Gearhart’s transportation analogies, I was a pilot who was going to have to land the plane. Professor Julie Lynem’s Multicultural Society and the Mass Media (JOUR 219) and Dr. Casey McDonald-Liu’s Public Relations (JOUR 312) were just two of the classes that reshaped how I see the news’ role in history and reminded me of the immense responsibility journalists have to tell the unfiltered truth. 

One day, during a stroll through Dexter Lawn, International Center booths caught my eye. I wandered over to the Foundation for International Education table out of curiosity and walked away in awe of the possibilities still ahead of me.

This past fall, I made my childhood dream of studying in London a reality, made even more lifelong friends and interned at a wellness travel magazine alongside a friend from that ol’ statistics class, all while securing a second internship at KSBY 6 back in SLO. 

In my final quarter, I reconnected with KCPR News and made my first reporter packages for MNTV. 

I am eternally grateful for every opportunity this hard-earned journey has given me. Majoring in journalism gave me exactly what I was looking for: a foundation flexible enough to grow into whatever comes next. It has been so much more than learning how a newscast should be stacked or editing in Adobe Premiere. The lessons of persistence, confidence, and self-discovery I found as a student journalist will stay with me forever. From a nervous transfer to an adventurer who reported from England and back, the plane has safely landed.