Ada Clark’s
9/11 Experience
On
September 11, 2001 twenty year old Mrs. Ada Clark was at Ball State University.
“I
was a junior at Ball State getting ready for my first class of the day. My
roommate called my attention to the TV, and we saw the second plane crash into
the towers. I felt confused,” Clark
said.
“At
the time, I was the features editor at the Ball State Daily News, so I
immediately went to the newsroom. Since my journalism professors knew I worked
at the paper, they excused me from most of my classes that day, and instead I
was assigned a story to write about the implications of the attacks. I spent
the rest of my day interviewing political science professors and working at the
copy desk at the paper,” Clark said. “All of us who were working at the paper
scrambled to put the next day’s issue together. Because the attacks were
nothing like any of us had ever experienced, the issue we produced was nothing
like we had ever made. Later that year, our Sept. 12 issue (covering the events
of Sept. 11) won a national award for being one of the best college papers in
the nation; however, it was very difficult to be excited about something we had
produced because of something happened that was so horrible.”
This day greatly impacted her
future.
“I
can honestly say that the events from Sept. 11 had a major impact on my career
choice. The experience of covering this story was one of the reasons why I
decided to change my major to journalism education,” Clark said. “I love
journalism, but I can become too involved emotionally in the stories that I
write to be well-suited for news writing. Later that semester I did a great
deal of soul-searching, and decided that I wanted to be a journalism teacher.”
