I grew up wanting to be a mad scientist. With a fervid obsession for spamming Bill Nye’s fanmail address and watching Beakman’s World, it was clear: I would go to the ends of the earth to share strange and unusual wonders with audiences everywhere. And I would always look as if I’d just stuck my finger in an electrical socket.

Cracking open rocks from my mom’s garden in search of geodes and tearing open batteries to examine the charged innards sustained my tactile curiosity for a good number of years. But it didn’t take too long for that energy to turn toward the written word. The stacks of journals I kept as a kid became heaps by high school. Today, I’m thankful for hard drives.

Like everyone in my graduate journalism program, I love to write. I can’t help but write. I must write. I majored in creative writing and speech comm, where I focused on public speaking, playwriting, ethnography, short stories, poetry and the very unartistic art of public relations writing. These experiences were rich and valuable, but they always seemed to lack the element of public discourse I so very much desire. I don’t want to merely entertain or even simply educate. I want to engage in conversations with readers, viewers and colleagues, much like the way I pretended I was best buds with Beakman and his oversized lab rat.

Journalism is the absolute best way to satiate an intense curiosity about the world. Perhaps “creative journalism” is a better moniker for my aspirations. Edutainment is a term I’ve been, well, entertaining.

I feel so privileged to enter this field at a time when social media is exploding, making connections between people, institutions and issues. Life on this edge is intuitive and lightning-fast. It makes the word delightful so literal. I wouldn’t choose to have been born in any other era. Except maybe a few years earlier in the 80s so as so more fully appreciate 90s grunge. I was a prepubescent flannel-wearing twerp who wasn’t allowed to watch MTV.

(I have a confession to make. This is a homework assignment for a class called “Digital Homeroom” [no joke] at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism’s graduate program.)