There isn’t an algorithm in this world that will piece together a proper work of journalism.
It took me some time to understand that when my career as an amateur reporter began. And when I did, I thought my interests sat on different ends of a spectrum, or at least on different halves of the UCLA campus.
The Daily Bruin helped me rethink my views. Soon enough, I was using the different lenses I had been viewing the world through in tandem rather than separately.
Four years later, I’m grateful I felt that initial moment of panic, when I realized my notes and quotes couldn’t be plugged into a formula that would spit out a concise summary of the swim meet I had to cover. That would have been too much like an exercise out of a weekly problem set, and who learns from those anyway?
My time here at UCLA consisted primarily of studying statistics in the classroom and penning dispatches about the Bruins’ athletic endeavors. Math was always a passion, writing barely a hobby, but there was more in common between the two duties than I first imagined.
After I tapped into my creativity – however limited the supply – to tell stories, I took that same mentality to tackling questions posed by professors on the chalkboard and explored outside the bounds of my classes.
The ideals of the scientific method written in textbooks soon became the crux of my identity as a reporter. Games were a forum where hypotheses could be tested and revised over the course of a season, stories and columns were the reports of the findings.
For all of my fascination with metrics, the immeasurable was equally interesting. Emotions are a vital element of any story, as hard as they might be to gauge.Standing in a locker room one night, I was talking to someone whose season was cut short after a painful injury, expecting him to be a little somber. Instead, he was smiling and optimistic while his teammate cried in the background.
My prediction was off – plenty of them were – and I suppose that’s why you need to leave some room for error.
The one figure I lost track of was the distance I traveled.
One week it was a cross-country pilgrimage to Madison Square Garden; the next it was a more taxing journey to a treacherous location: the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.
That healthy travel budget is one of the many things I’m grateful the Daily Bruin afforded me. Having a product where I could express my thoughts was a great outlet. Most importantly, the office in Kerckhoff Hall is home to a diverse collection of personalities that challenge one another to better themselves.
An interest in sports is what got me to join this newspaper but I leave more curious about the world at large. Watching sporting events is a great release from society, but few people have duties inside the arena after the buzzer sounds.
Being more than just a spectator is fulfilling, especially in a field where the numerically inclined are leading a revolution.
Sports statistics are comprehensively tracked and publicly available for all to analyze, often hand-delivered to your cushy press box seat in a cleanly formatted box score.
Instead of letting it come to me, I’ll be looking for data and using everything I’ve learned here to unearth the insights.
Menezes was sports senior staff from 2011-2013, assistant sports editor from 2010-2011 and a sports reporter from 2009-2010.