Lecturer Rob King (center) with Recipients Steven Yanda and Megan Hupp

I’ve always been a perfectionist.

As a kid, my perfectionism drove everyone – even my fourth grade teacher – crazy. On my way to school one sloppy, muddy spring day, I let my homework assignment slip out of my hand. A sharp March wind snatched my careful work and dropped it into a puddle. Sobbing, I ran home with the wet, dirty paper crumpled in my ten-year-old fist.

I was already late for school. My mother, finally putting her foot down against my obsessive-compulsiveness, ordered me to school – dirty, imperfect homework in hand.

I climbed the stairs in my small, parochial elementary school, tears stinging behind my eyes. My careful penmanship was smudged. What had been a crisp piece of lined notebook paper was now a dingy gray color, damp and beginning to crinkle.

My hand trembled as I handed in my first flawed piece of homework. My fourth grade teacher knew how I slaved, always checking and double-checking my work. To my shock, my teacher simply smiled kindly and accepted my work. She later called my mother to declare, “My God! Megan turned in an imperfect piece of work!”

Everyone says in a job interview, perfectionism is a trait the interviewee should be working to fix. “Oh, I’m such a perfectionist,” you’re supposed to say to your potential employer. “I’m working on it, but I just can’t help obsessing over every tiny detail!” It’s a bad, good quality employers actually look for. I dislike saying perfectionism is a trait I’m working to rid myself of. At it’s extreme, perfectionism is paralyzing. In moderation, however, perfectionism is a huge motivator.

That perfectionist nature – while not as powerful as it was when I was ten years old – is what drives me to stay late at The Marquette Tribune office, babysitting stories through production to ensure that every detail is right. Perfectionism is what makes me cringe when a mistake gets through to print. It’s what makes my stomach knot with guilt when I receive a good grade on something I didn’t put 110 percent in to. And I like to think my perfectionist nature is what drove me to journalism.

In its essence, isn’t journalism really about perfectionism? We’re urged to “get the story right” and to get it right the first time. Of course, editor’s notes, corrections and clarifications exist for when a mishap does happen. But I don’t want to correct or clarify. I want to understand the nuances of each story and related them clearly and accurately in every story I write. I take pride in seeing a story I poured myself into, printed on a page, precise and error-free. Perfecting my work constantly drives and motivates me to work harder and do better.

When I attended Our Lady of the Presentation grade school in Lee’s Summit, Mo., I would start off my day reading the Kansas City Star as my mom drove me to school.

Mostly I just read the sports pages, because at that age, I really could not have cared less about President Clinton and all that did or did not go on in the Oval Office.

Often times, I would ask my mom to park our Honda Accord in the school parking lot for a few minutes so that I could finish reading the columns of Joe Posnanski and Jason Whitlock.

More than reading their entertaining opinions, I enjoyed digging into a good feature story by one of the Star’s more talented reporters. Wright Thompson was always my favorite, but his in-depth profiles would always take me a while to get through, mostly because I read and reread them many times.

You see, I believe journalism is, ultimately, the study of people. Every story ever written comes down to how someone did something. It’s the reporter’s job to portray accurately that person (or persons).

In that Honda Accord, I became enamored with telling other people’s stories. Ever since, I’ve been trying to do the job myself.

During my sophomore year at Rockhurst High School in Kansas City, Mo., I saw an ad in the FYI section of the Star asking for teenagers who wanted to write for the teen section of the newspaper.

The section was known as TeenStar, and for the next three years, I became one of its main contributors. I covered such topics as cheating in school and gambling among teens, but what I enjoyed the most was the work I got to do in sports.

I got a chance to interview teenage soccer star Freddy Adu. I covered a girls’ youth soccer team as they made it all the way to the U.S. National Championships. I even got a chance to write an in-depth feature (Wright Thompson-style) on U.S. Olympic gymnast Courtney McCool.

From that point on, I was hired as a stringer for the sports department and have since had many articles published in the section.

During my first year on staff at the Marquette Tribune, I covered men’s and women’s soccer and women’s basketball. However, I had the most fun (and yes, I do believe reporting, especially on deadline, is fun) putting together in-depth features on two campus-known figures.

I learned a lot about the will to live from former men’s basketball assistant coach Trey Schwab, as I compiled his tale of surviving idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. I also saw how faith and sports can intertwine in harmony while portraying the personality of women’s basketball coach Terri Mitchell.

As much fun as I have had working at the Tribune, my greatest journalistic experience so far came this past summer when I interned in the sports department of the Washington Post. I always had heard that the Post staffed some of the best writing and reporting talent in the country, but I had no idea how much that was true until I saw if for myself.

In addition to learning from great sportswriters like Eli Saslow, Barry Svrluga, Les Carpenter, Jason La Canfora, and Howard Bryant (who now works at ESPN), I gained a better understanding of how to put together a complete story. The photographers at the Post are outstanding, and the coordination between editorial and art content is incredible. I have never worked at a publication where the articles and the photos complimented each other so much.

During the internship, I got to cover Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles baseball games, as well as training camp for the Washington Redskins, but I was most pleased that I was allowed to put together so many features.

At the end of the summer, I was informed the Post would like me to come back next summer for another internship, at the end of which they would like to hire me full-time. During all the time I spent reading in my mom’s Accord as a grade-schooler, I never imagined my career would start off this way.