Hello fellow citizens of Sampson County! My name is Cheyenne Harbison and I am a fourth year student at the Sampson Early College High School in Clinton. For the next six weeks I will be interning here at The Sampson Independent as part of my Graduation Project for school. In my project, I have to complete 30 hours of an internship and then write a paper that can relate to it. I’ve chosen to title my paper “Social Media’s Effects on Mental Illness”; in it I will discuss how the romanticizing of mental illness paired with the ability to create an idealized image of a person’s life can lead to mental illness. I hope to be able to post some columns geared around the research paper as well.

I am currently pursuing a Business Administration and Accounting degree at the early college. After I’m done with that degree, I’m considering taking a gap year to get some work experience and get more into the community since I would have more time to do so without being overwhelmed by school. At the close of my gap year, I would like to go to DeVry University in either Morrisville or Charlotte to continue my degree in Accounting. I would like to be a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in the state of Oklahoma where my dad and his side of the family currently live.

I chose to do my internship at The Sampson Independent because it has always been a dream of mine to have my own column in a newspaper ever since I watched “Charmed” as a little girl and saw Phoebe with her advice column. However, I admittedly never thought I’d actually make it here to do so.

Working as a journalist is also one of my back-up plans if being a CPA doesn’t pan out, so working here would be a wonderful way to see if I could be happy doing this job. I will also be allowed to cover a few news stories for the paper if I can find some decent topics. I hope to get some valuable working experience here as well as the ability to talk to people more by conducting interviews for different articles. This would also be a great opportunity to increase my writing skills and possibly even get some of my poetry published for everyone to see.

I am looking forward to releasing articles for The Sampson Independent and also meeting people in the community while covering news stories. If there are any topics that you would like for me to cover in my column that aren’t too controversial, please feel free to email me at [email protected].

Cheyenne Harbison is an Early College High School student completing her senior project at The Sampson Independent.

By Cheyenne Harbison

Contributing columnist

Cheyenne Harbison
https://www.clintonnc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/web1_Cheyenne.jpgCheyenne Harbison