The highlights of my college days were my two stints on my student newspaper, in spring 2002 and summer 2003. Both times I was hired as a "correspondent" earning $10 per story, essentially a stringer. I didn't get paid much at all, but in a lot of ways it was the best job I've ever had.

I really felt at home among the journalism types. One thing that can be said about journalism is that no one does it for the money. Or they do, in part, but they also have to love it since the financial rewards are so small compared to what you find elsewhere. My editor from my first stint at the paper remains one of the coolest people I've ever met. A short guy with a crew cut and glasses, he was funny and smart and dedicated. I can still see him smoking cigarettes in the back of the student union. Once after a meeting of the newspaper staff, he said to us, "Isn't this what you all want to be doing for the rest of your life? So go out and do a good job." You could tell he really loved what he was doing. Best of all, he told me he liked my stories and gave me some good assignments.

When I was researching a story I felt like a different person. I was determined to do an excellent job on my stories, and because of that I found a boldness in myself I never knew existed. In my new role as a footloose, hard-nosed reporter, I would ask the tough questions. I decided I was willing go anywhere and talk to anyone to add to a better story. In other words, I was willing to risk making a pest of myself, something I would never do in my regular life.

In my two semesters I ended up talking to all sorts of people. I would go around campus, long skinny reporter's in hand, jotting down quotes in my bad shorthand. I marched into the UTEP police station and asked to see some records about an accident that took place on campus. I asked students what they really thought about the financial aid office. I went down to the Don Haskins Center and interviewed some cute kids at a basketball camp. I talked to fraternity boys and sorority girls about their rush weeks, and I asked a dietician about the dangers of diet pills. But I think my favorite story of all was an interview with Phil Jones, the Australian digeridoo player who gave a demonstration on campus one afternoon. He drove around the country giving demonstrations on the benefits of deep breathing and playing the digeridoo. For some reason I thought this was extremely fascinating. I came up with a huge list of questions and interviewed him for about 10 minutes, you'd think I was interviewing some famous rock star. Sadly, the story was cut and never saw the light of day, but I did find out more than I ever wanted to know about the digeridoo.

On more than one occasion my stories would get cut like the Phil Jones story. More often, they were banished to the inside pages of the paper. But a couple of times my editor would give me a plum assignment and my story would end up on the front page. Maybe this is silly, but even now those occasions still come up when I think about what I am proudest of in my life.

I look back and see a colorful collage of experiences, a collection of things I would never have seen otherwise. But it ended up being a bittersweet experience because at the end of my second stint I had to admit to myself that I was not cut out to be a reporter. When push came to shove, I was too much of a marshmallow to ask people things they really didn't want to answer. There were times where I felt like I was really annoying people, where I got embarrassed and lost my nerve, and I didn't like that at all. I could put on the aggressive reporter persona for a couple of semesters, but I knew I couldn't do it as a career. Sure, it was rewarding to think about a lot of people reading what I wrote and getting something from it, and it was fun getting to meet new people and see interesting things, but in the long run, I knew I wouldn't enjoy the day-to-day reporter tasks of making a million phone calls, banging on people's doors, and asking annoying questions. Being a reporter isn't my calling. It was hard to admit, but I knew it was so.

After that summer I quit the newspaper and spent the rest of my time in college studying things like math, computer programming, and software engineering. Yet somehow those days as a correspondent will always be special, more fun and exciting to me than any of the time I spent churning out code in the computer lab. Me as a bold and adventurous journalist, who knew it was possible? I'll always be glad for that experience even if it was short-lived.