c o n n i e s h e n

It’s funny how certain patterns of sounds that come out of our mouths after organizing them in our heads can have so much power in our daily lives. I fell in love with words when I was very young and always wrote short stories and read books whenever I could. There are piles of journals in the room I grew up in filled with the scrawls of a toddler to my signature handwriting as a teenager that told stories from mystical creatures to just getting my own emotions on paper. Somewhere along the line, I lost my love for reading and writing and only found myself doing so for school.

I am fortunate that the beauty of reading and writing and the power of words found me again when I decided to take communications and journalism classes at the University of Washington. I remembered what it was like to tell stories and learned to give microphones to real people who feel muted. Words are versatile and can be both loud and silent. I truly believe that communicating is the key to a happy and successful life and that’s all I really want to be when I grow up - happy. I hope that I am able to share stories of other people and their happiness with the power that words give me through my journey in journalism and writing. I recently found a magazine solely dedicated to telling happy stories and that is a project that has parallel ideas to what I want to curate and create in the future through my abilities in easily connecting with people.

For now, I am a studying journalism and psychology at the University of Washington. As a Las Vegas native, moving to Seattle has brought me out of my comfort zone and given me a lot of opportunities to grow as a person.