by Natalie Jarvie
Graphic Designer
I have been going to Washtenaw Community College since I was 16-years-old and I have been with The Voice since I was 17-years-old. I am now graduating with honors on May 19 at commencement.
My experience at WCC has been filled with ups and downs. My first year here, I was dual enrolled due to the fact that I was home-schooled and only 16-years-old. I started out with only one class because I hadn’t gone to an actual school since second grade. My next semester was when I took my first graphic design class and I fell in love with it.
I continued with the program and kept finding more and more I loved about it. One of which is the amazing teachers in the program, Kristy deCastro being one of them. She has taught me so much about design and software. Ingrid Ankerson taught me a lot about typography and really helped me through my final design class.
I was lucky enough to be a co-president of the graphic design club with one of my classmates, this allowed us to hold a linocut workshop on campus to learn about how to do that and improve our linocut skills.
Last year I was in the Digital Media Arts Gala where I got to showcase all my work from my time at WCC, this experience is one of the best things I will take away from WCC.
After my first year I started at The Washtenaw Voice. The Voice has taught me so much, I have learned about how to work with a team in a sometimes stressful environment (our production days). I’ve learned a lot about design software, more than I ever would have in a classroom alone.
The Voice has given me a lot of fantastic opportunities: a trip to Washington D.C. for a newspaper conference, learning how to improve newspaper design. We also went to Dallas, Texas for a newspaper conference and learned so much from the amazing Charles Apple! He is a designer who taught us a lot about charts and graphs. He is the deputy design director at Houston Chronicle. Finally it has given me the opportunity of having a space I can go in between classes to do work, make some coffee, and sometimes just to take a breath.
The Voice has been a wonderful space for me to learn and grow into the person I am today. I’ve gotten the chance to write about some of my own life experiences and share events I have found within the community.
The team has been there for me through getting married, having my daughter, getting my first full-time job and now graduating.
I have made a lot of long-lasting friendships and connections while at The Voice, the team has given me people I can call for anything: photos, illustrations, writing. I also have our amazing adviser Judy who I can always depend on for a professional reference.
This last semester has been filled with lots of ups and downs like our editor getting a job and a lot of our writers leaving the team for various reasons. In addition to these unexpected obstacles, not all of our team positions were filled at the beginning of the semester. But even with all that, we never missed a paper deadline. This demonstrates how the team always pulls through and finds a way to make it work. It might get stressful but at the end of the day we have a beautiful paper that we can be proud of.