May 12, 2025 by Ava Tatum (‘25)
Guys, I love the Lightning Rod. I genuinely think that this club is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Freshman year, I signed up for a journalism foundations class, I wanted to be a writer. Unfortunately, the teacher that taught the class was not as supportive of my dreams and told me I would never make it in the journalism world. Harsh for a 14-year-old, I know. The only way to write for the newspaper at my old school was to take the journalism class route, which meant I would have had to start from the very bottom and build my way up, with verbal abuse along the way.
It was too much for me as a freshman, so I put those dreams on hold. That was until I transferred to Saratoga at the start of my senior year and found out about the Lightning Rod. The first meeting was intimidating, I said like 4 words in total, but then my first article was published and when I walked into the room for the second meeting of the year, someone told me that my article was “awesome.” As of April 28th, 2025, I have written over 20 articles spanning from satire to challenges to fashion.
A joke that I make with the staff (who I can now call friends of mine) is that if I could, I would become a “super senior” so that I could keep on writing for the Lightning Rod. Don’t get too excited, I am already writing for my college’s newspaper. But honestly, if I had come to Saratoga just a few years earlier, I would have been in Lightning Rod for all 4 years of high school. My point in all this rambling is that this club gave me so many friends, experiences, and a little bit of social anxiety. If you have a dream of writing, photography, graphic design, social media management, or anything else creative, please consider joining the Lightning Rod.
Okay I finished the article, please let me out of the janitors closet now guys.
Joking.
Probably.