Hannah McNichols, opinion editor, here.

Day four. Wow. Not sure where to start. This trip has been the best and I wouldn’t have wanted to come with anyone else.

Sessions today, pretty sure I met my #WCW for the rest of my life. No, it’s not Taylor Swift. Erin Castellano is who I want to be in 20 years.

Castellano teaches all journalism classes at Clayton High School in Clayton, Missouri. She was overall the best speaker I have heard out of the 10 sessions I’ve been in the last two days.

She didn’t just talk about newspaper and what to do and what not to do, she talked about how your brain works with your staff. She goes by not what you feel in your heart but what actually makes you have feelings, which is all in your brain.

Endorphins and dopamine are your “selfish” chemicals. Endorphins are what makes you happy, like doing what you love, your passion. Dopamine is making progress and getting rewarded, such as completing tasks on a to-do list.

Serotonin and oxytocin are the “selfless” chemicals. Serotonin being your pride chemical; you don’t just graduate, you have a huge celebration and then parties after so that your family and teachers can boast about how they helped you accomplish 12 years of school, they feel proud of you. Oxytocin is chemically connected to love. You don’t feel love in your heart it’s in your brain. The bond you have with a human being, it helps build trust and connections. The way Castellano talked about how her class was run and how her students aren’t just students – they are humans, they’re not “staffers”, they are people.

Her newsroom has a mission. Castellano goes by The Golden Circle which deals with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ on the outer circles and ‘why’ in the center of the circle. People have ‘what’ on the outside, which is the basics. Then you have ‘how’, which is the telling of the story and journalism. On the inside, there’s ‘why’. ‘Why’ is what really matters. It’s a person’s meaning of his or her organization. It is why you do what you do. Clayton High School’s newspaper The Globe‘s ‘why’ is “To be the bearers of light, to make the world a better place.”

At the end Castellano showed a slide that said, “In the end; We just want to do work that we feel matters with people we care about and who we believe care about us.”

With this ending my journalism experience here, I feel ready to face going home and dominating my senior year as a top editor in newspaper.

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Tanna Jones, sports editor, here.

Today I was able to meet someone that could possibly be the future me. Lindsay Jones. She has been a sports journalists for the past ten years! Jones is a USA Today sports reporter for the Denver Broncos, and spoke to a group of us about her job, her role as a female in a male-dominated sport. I interviewed her for an upcoming story on female journalists in sports.

I learned the history of sports journalists, I also learned that the number of women in a average news room is 14.6 percent and that the average number of female sports journalists in the world is 9.6 percent. It’s crazy that a gender could define what you do and how you do it.

Thanks to the equal access law, I am able to do what I love while being in that 9.6 percent.

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Ms. Dryden, The Oracle’s adviser, has a few things to say among the brilliance above.

So these students are amazing me. Each time they jet out of a seminar they felt inspired at or when we sit around a dinner table at a local eatery and they tell me their vision for leading The Oracle next year, I am astounded and inspired by them. Although usually people assume I’m the one that should be doing the inspiring, it is and has been quite the opposite this year.

As Hannah, Tanna and I were sitting downstairs in between seminars today, Hannah had an “epiphany”. She then looked straight in Tanna’s eyes and said, “Oh my gosh, we’re seniors now.” And although the class of 2015 has yet to exit the building and toss their caps in the air, they’re right. Instant tears came to our eyes; yes, I said ‘ours’. Who knew I could come into a position to lead this publication, make connections with these student journalists, and then take them on an amazing trip to Denver to learn from professionals we all admire? I dreamed this. So when Hannah mentioned we were one year away from graduation of some of my closest students, I teared up, and let a few tears fall along with them.

We are a family.

The meeting among the staff was focused on goals for next year, implementing a new schedule for issues, and improving our leadership so that our staff of reporters and section editors feel a part of our newspaper family. To get them to that point is hard work, which was said by many of our seminar speakers. We concluded to focus our efforts every day to being accessible and being the three P’s: Professional, Positive and Productive. Bridging the gap between the upperclassman and the underclassman is a huge goal and building relationships up front, we think, is the key. These student leaders are ready for this. Do you know how I know? I can feel it. If you’re a teacher, coach or student leader in any organization, you can feel potential. They’re passionate and being passionate is half the battle to being successful.

I could go on and on about this and these students, and all the ones back in Iowa probably reading this, and I’d say the same thing. They may be intimidated by the unexpected future of college or new leadership in a class we call home, but their hearts in the right place. So Denver has let me see into a part of these students’ lives that I never knew could make me care for them more than I already did. But it has. So thank you to the people who donated – uncountable alumni, teachers, family and friends of me and North High School – for this amazing opportunity for me, but most of all, for my ‘kids’.

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