Lead America Sucks, Please They Were a Game Changer For Me

Prepared for College Thanks to Lead America

Yea! I just found out that I get to intern at our local TV station this summer – fun fun! Once again, I played up my Lead America experience last summer, and also the fact that I REALLY hope to intern at CNN while I’m in college. I also told them about our Internet scam story in the works and they want me to work on an expanded version of that for adults this summer. Pretty cool, huh?

This fall my roommate and I will be living in Brumby Hall, an all-girls freshman dorm on campus. I preferred co-ed, but my parents were adamant I stay in a female-only dorm. It’s a southern thing, I guess. At Lead America, we stayed in the dorms at Fordham University, which was fun. It’s a beautiful campus in the summertime and gave us a taste of the college life. It sucks that we didn’t really get to tour the whole campus, but we were non-stop busy every day with guest speakers, workshops, seminars and field trips in the city. In retrospect, the Lead America conference was the best 10 days of my life, well worth the money and time, and not even close to being a scam. I feel well-prepared and confident going into college this fall – and you can’t put a price on that!

I Read A Review Online That Lead America Sucks, Here’s My Experience With Lead America

Lead America is No Scam – College Credits Earned and Accepted

Graduating from high school is a little scary, with all my friends going to different schools, but it’s also exciting to move on to bigger and better things. The cool thing is that another girl that I met at the Lead America media conference is also going to Georgia for journalism and we’ll hopefully get to room together. I sure will miss my best friend Laura, though. We’ve been friends since 1st grade but she’s going to another school, which sucks.

I just found out the other day that Georgia is going to accept the two college credits I earned at the Lead America journalism program! My parents were especially pleased to hear that. What a great way to start college. I wrote about my Lead America experience in my application essay and talked about it with the academic advisors I met with when I was touring the school. I had read some reviews that said admissions counselors think Lead America is just a scam, but the advisors I talked to said that they looked at it favorably, especially if students could demonstrate how it helped them. I think they were impressed with the fact that Lead America helped me be more focused than ever during my senior year. The thing that was most valuable for me is that I feel more confident in myself and my abilities as a writer and reporter. I feel like the Media & Journalism conference helped sharpen my decision making and communication skills. It was definitely a tremendous opportunity I’ll never forget. Whoever thinks Lead America is a scam either hasn’t been to one of their programs or didn’t pay attention and goofed off while they were there – there’s no other explanation.

Learning About News Stories About Internet Scams at the Lead America Conference

Learned So Much at the Lead America Media Conference

I love the action of breaking news. I’m such an adrenaline junkie. In my sophomore year I was a journalist for our school newspaper, and I’ve been a student reporter for our high school TV station the past two years. After Oprah recently did a segment on texting and driving, we started researching and putting together our own local story. I really feel like the Lead America media program helped me learn to present the story objectively from different viewpoints. Talk about scary – I know I’ll never text and drive again! It sucks that people don’t realize the danger, and I really hope the story will help save lives. It hasn’t aired yet, but I sent the rough draft of the video to my roommate from the Lead America conference for her input and she gave it great reviews. Looking back, I made some really great friends at Lead America, and we all exchange ideas for stories. In fact, the idea for one of the last stories I’m helping with this year came from one of the guys in my group. It’s about the most popular Internet scams that teenagers fall for – another compelling topic that kids need to know about.