My Most Challenging and Rewarding Year at CHARM

By Jack Basl | July 21, 2026

This year has probably been my best year at CHARM, but also my most stressful one. I have accomplished a lot, and I am very proud of my work or the work I have helped create, such as videos, literary maps, and my articles. I have talked to many great people and have gotten to learn many new things about journalism and about life as a whole.

Towards the beginning of the 2025-2026 CHARM year, we, as an organization, created a map of places that inspire us to create works or are about works in general. This map was for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference & Bookfair. Our goal was for people attending this conference to know of and potentially go see the places where students get inspired about writing or that are about writing as a whole in Baltimore. CHARM collaborated with a few other student writing organizations in this process when gathering locations to place on the map. My location was Fort McHenry since I love to go through the history, look out into the harbor, and see the cherry blossoms in the spring. Also, with the collaboration of other student writing organizations, I saw a friend, and we were able to bond over our love for writing. 

Overall, the process of helping to create the literary map was really fun since I was able to have the ability to put out to the team what I think we should do, even if the idea did not move forward. We had many meetings about the format of the map, how the colors tie in, etc., which taught me a lot about the process of making an infographic that many people are going to see.

The creation of the map was spent with the entirety of CHARM, all of us pitching in to create it. However, the majority of my time was spent creating (or trying to find the time to create) my articles. I really enjoyed this year, though, since I actually was able to get articles with topics I truly care about. For example, my robotics article is on a topic I am really passionate about. I was able to easily line up an interview with someone who coaches a robotics team, as well as being able to give some of my personal experience since I am a part of a robotics team. Yet, it was still a pain to get done. I had a rough time managing my time between CHARM, school, and other extracurriculars. I eventually got it done, but the time problem carried over to this article and other articles I worked on.

This year was also the year I ended up talking to more people within CHARM that weren’t people I already knew. I am generally a quiet person around people I am not really familiar with, but this year through CHARM, I talked to more people than I originally thought I would. I would say I became good friends with them, and sometimes we talk about things that are CHARM-related either before the meeting or when we are working on our articles. As previously stated, I strengthened some bonds I already had in CHARM, which is really nice.

I have learned a lot during my time at CHARM this year, whether through successes or failures. There are three major things that I learned that improved my knowledge. The first one is time management. As previously mentioned, I kind of struggled to publish articles promptly. There were a variety of factors that went into my poor time management, but I did end up learning the one big thing I wanted to learn from CHARM, even if it wasn’t the way I wanted to learn it. From this past year, what I will do next year to improve my time management is make a more solid calendar/planner. This year, my “planner” was loosely put together in the Notes app on my phone or just in my head. It didn’t really help me remember or get me to do things at reasonable times. So next year, I will have a planner/calendar where I set specific times I will work on my articles. If this goes well for me next year, I will then keep it with me throughout my life.

The second thing I learned that ties into time management is prioritization. I already knew a good deal about prioritization, so in reality this just reinforced what I knew, but that still is good. I knew what things needed to be done sooner and what could wait a little bit. This would have been better if I were better at managing my time. The final thing that CHARM helped me improve was my communication with the adult leaders of the organization. The previous year, I wouldn’t email that much if something happened with me, but this year I definitely upped my game. I made sure to email when I would be missing a meeting, or I at least sent an email before the next one explaining why I was out. I also made sure to be honest with where I was in my article process so that the CHARM adult leaders could help me if I needed it. Those were just the three major skills I built this year, but I learned a lot more minor ones.

In the end, the 2025-2026 CHARM year was a great year. I was able to accomplish so much, as well as being able to learn a lot as well. As a member of the Student Editorial Board and a part of the Journalism team, I am happy to be here.