Everything You Need to Know About Newsroom by the Bay

For high school students who are interested in pursuing a college degree – and possibly career – in journalism, it is highly important that you find ways to set yourself up for success. While your grades and test scores in high school are obviously very important when it comes to getting into many of the top colleges or universities in the country, a high school student’s extracurricular activity should also never be overlooked.

This is especially true if a student is interested in applying to a specific program – for example, a journalism program – at a top university, which may come with some specific requirements for students in order to enroll in that specific program. If you are a high school student and are interested in learning about some of the best programs that you can take part in during your high school years, then you have come to the right place.

While chances are good that you already know this, the Newsroom by the Bay program is simply one of the most prestigious for America’s youngest and most promising journalists.

If you are curious about learning about the Newsroom by the Bay program, you have come to the right place! Here at AdmissionSight, we make it our primary goal to help the top students in the United States get into the colleges or universities of their dreams. While much of that includes helping students out with academic guidance, writing the perfect application essays, and getting great letters of recommendation from their teachers and school faculty, it also absolutely includes helping students decide what the very best extracurriculars for them are.

One of the best ways for students to prove their deep interest in a specific extracurricular activity is to not only invest their time and energy during the school year but also do so during the summer months. The Newsroom by the Bay summer program is a wonderful way for students interested in journalism, writing, photography, and more to show just how invested they are in these types of skills and activities.

The truth is that some of the best top schools in the country look at extracurriculars very closely. The reason why is because students who tend to apply to schools like Ivy League schools and top public schools often have similar numbers when it comes to GPAs and standardized test scores. After all, all those students excel at being students.

So, what college admissions officers tend to look at to set the most impressive students apart is how they spent their time and energy when they were not excelling within the classroom. Before we break down all the valuable information about the Newsroom by the Bay program, let’s go into some greater detail about what college admissions officers are specifically looking for when they are looking at a high school applicant’s extracurricular activity.

What college admissions officers look for in extracurriculars?

Before we dive into what college admissions officers look for in extracurriculars, it is very important to make one thing clear: High school students should not be choosing their extracurricular activities solely because they think that that is what college admissions officers want to see. The best way to choose your extracurricular activities in high school is to identify things that you are passionate about outside of school and invest your time and energy in related programs and groups.

While you can spend your freshman year in high school trying out many different clubs and groups to see what you like the most, as you enter your sophomore, junior, and senior years in high school, you will want to have just a few extracurricular activities that you have spent a lot of your time and energy in. Now, let’s breakdown what college admissions officers look for:

Leadership

It is no accident that this is the very first thing that we are mentioning when it comes to what college admissions officers want to see. the top colleges are going to want to see that students were able to gain roles of major impact and leadership in any group, programmer team that they were a part of in high school. This could mean being a captain of a sports team or it could mean being the captain of the Science Olympiad team. Alternatively, one of the best ways to show leadership is to start a group on your very own.

Above all, what is most important is that students are able to display how they were able to have a strong impact on the direction that an overall group or program went during their involvement.

Long-term involvement

Remember how we said that college admissions officers prefer to see a student engaged in just a few extracurriculars over a long period of time rather than many over a short period of time? Well, this is where that comes in. One very important way for colleges to gauge how important your commitment was to one of your next curricular is how long you were involved with them.

With That being said, you should not be afraid to start new things if you form new interests during their high school years, just be sure that you have been involved in a few activities but you’ve stuck with over the years.

1 great way to help admissions officers understand how important your involvement in an extracurricular is to you is by being incredibly thoughtful when you are writing and describing your activities. For example, in the common application, high school students are asked to list “Details, honours won, and accomplishments.” When you get the chance to do this, don’t simply write that you were elected to be a captain or president of a group, talk about the responsibilities that that title held, and why you cherished that exciting undertaking.

Quality over quantity

We touched on this a little bit earlier, but it should be fully clear what you should value most when it comes to choosing their extracurriculars. One thing to be sure is that the top colleges do not want to see that you are a Jack of all trades, but master of none. They want to make sure that their student body is diverse and interests, passions, and skills.

That means that if you are incredibly passionate about something specific, don’t be afraid to put all of your in all of your extra time into that passion. if this describes you, one word of advice would be to make sure that you express that you are open to trying new things when you get to college. Curiosity and openness are important traits that college admissions officers look for when they’re trying to decide whether or not a student will succeed on their college campus.

Initiative

Another very important thing that you Should be able to show through the extracurriculars that you take part in high school is your ability to take initiative. This is why starting your own group or Columbine high school can be so impressive in the eyes of college admissions officers. If you are passionate about something and your school does not offer a related program, do not hesitate to put in motion your ability to start your very own group.

Potential

Why do colleges care so much about extracurricular activities? The primary reason is that they want to see what kind of potential students have when it comes to achieving both in and outside of the classroom. They want to admit students who will be positive forces on campus for their four years on campus and are also surely interested in admitting students who they think have a bright future ahead of them after they graduate from university.

You have the potential to have a great impact on campus in your own way, the extracurriculars you take part in are one of the very best ways to prove that.

About Newsroom by the Bay

Now that you’ve got a great idea why impressive extracurriculars were so important for high school students, let’s breakdown why Newsroom by the Bay is such a great thing for high school students to invest their time and energy in.

In all, Newsroom by the Bay is a digital journalism program for high school students that is offered online and on-campus at the highly prestigious Stanford University. this program is perfect for high school students for passionate about journalism whether or not they have tons of journalism experience or not at all. What’s most important is that students who are interested in Newsroom by the Bay “believe that critical thinking matters and that telling true stories makes the world better.”

In order to enroll, students to be in the U.S. or equivalent secondary grades 9-12.

When it comes to the people who are teaching at Newsroom by the Bay, the directors, and teachers are award-winning educators and journalists. Their team leaders are among the best college journalists in the United States and abroad and Newsroom by the Bay makes a point to introduce its students to professional journalists and authors who come in as guest speakers.

Newsroom by the Bay Program Options

Students at Newsroom by the Bay’s online and on-campus programs are taught by some of the nation’s top journalism educators. Through enrolling, students have the opportunity to meet with them from professional and college media guest speakers. On top of that, students involved get the opportunity to practice what they are learning using the latest digital publishing tools. Newsroom by the Bay Has the goal of blending classic and traditional journalism lessons with technology, digital literacy, and multimedia training of the 21st century.

Overall, the program’s goal is to:

• improve its students writing in critical thinking abilities
• give students the tools they need to jumpstart or improve the journalism programs at their own schools
• introduce students to the job of journalism in college and as a greater career
• encourage students to become more efficient consumers and makers of media
• help students understand the crucial role that journalism plays in democracy and civil society
• leadership, empathy and ethics among students involved, regardless of whether or not those students are interested and ultimately pursuing a career in journalism.

In all, Newsroom by the Bay offers its students a Year 1 and Year 2 program. in both programs, students attend morning classes, work on stories during an afternoon lab, and attend guest speaker presentations or special events in the evening.

While the Year 1 program and Year 2 Program are somewhat similar, here are the primary differences:

Year 1 in Newsroom by the Bay

The goal of the Newsroom by the Bay’s Year 1 program is to teach the students involved the basics of journalism. These basics are meant to help them begin or improve their own practice of journalism. Students in the Year 1 classes or typically have one or two years of journalism experience in their school programs. Some of those incoming students may be editors in chief at their school, and some Google enroll in the class so that they can get their first experience practicing journalism. Year 1 Students will also get the opportunity to interact with students from other places in the country.   This allows for incredibly meaningful conversations in which students from all over the world learn about how journalism behaves in different parts of the world.

In Year 1, Morning class topics include things like news reporting and writing, such as features, reviews, and op-ed pieces. topics also include photojournalism, mobile video, and students get the opportunity to edit their own material using iPads and digital publishing/storytelling tools.

Finally, students get the opportunity to publish their work during their camp session using the highly professional online publishing tool, WordPress.

Year 2 in Newsroom by the Bay

After the fantastic opportunities that Year 1 of Newsroom by the Bay offer students, many end up returning for a second year (sometimes even for a third or fourth)! the program itself also makes a point to recruit students with fantastic skills in specific areas of journalism, such as photography and web design.

The focus of Year 2 of the program is to give the students involved an opportunity to advance the great skills that they developed in their first year with the program.

In Year 2, students will engage in morning class topics that include design thinking, multimedia story packaging, digital platforms, student press rights, the art of the interview, and solutions journalism. Depending on the skills that students are most interested in, students get the chance to create and publish their work in a variety of different formats including WordPress websites and Adobe publishing tools. While Year 1 students will often join pop-up projects depending on their interest, Year 2 students are typically tasked with leading those projects.

One young student named Lydia Zhou who took part in the program had nothing but great things to say.

“I spent seven days at the beautiful Stanford campus in Palo Alto, close to San Francisco, studying every type of journalism possible and even got a chance to report on a story,” Zhou wrote. “I met people from all over the world who shared the same intense passion as me as well as leaders in the journalism world. They were all incredibly helpful and charismatic, and I got so close to them that it felt like they were my family.

My team leader, Irene, graduated from Northwestern with a journalism major and is currently working as a news anchor at CBS. Clearly, she was experienced. I connected with her on a personal level because she was Chinese and spoke Mandarin like me. She even studied abroad in Shanghai, which is where my relatives live, and I visit every year.

I became close to many of my peers too and met people all the way from France to the Philippines to Los Angeles. We all kept in contact, including the team leaders. Looking back, I couldn’t be more grateful for the chance to attend.”

One very important thing to note is that while Newsroom by the Bay is typically offered both for students online and for students who travel or community to the Stanford University campus, the novel coronavirus pandemic has made it so that programs in the summer of 2020 will only be offered online.

Surely, the program will be offered both in-person and online in the future.

When it comes to payment, students are expected to pay a total of $1,499.00 for the two-week session. With that session, students get daily online classroom and newsroom, digital media training, time zone options for overseas students who are enrolled, one-on-one coaching, access to collaborative storytelling and publishing tools, and a one-year subscription to the AP Stylebook online.

When it comes to students who are interested in journalism, there are few extracurriculars as well-regarded as the Newsroom by the Bay program. If you are interested in pursuing a degree or career in journalism, you would absolutely benefit from taking part in this fantastic summer program.