On September 11th, 2025, Ceania Gonzales, a sophomore at Stonybrook University, returned to her alma mater, Pat-Med, to inspire young journalists by sharing her time as Editor in Chier of The Red&Black and as an active participant in RaiderTV.
She started off her presentation by talking about what sparked her interest in journalism. She wanted to follow in the footsteps of Rory Gilmore from The Gilmore Girls, so she got involved early in her freshman year.
She got more into it as the years went on and by her junior year was publishing articles consistently. Gonzales was even invited to be a Student presenter at the BASH Awards during her senior year.
BASH is also a very big field trip the journalism classes go to every year, BASH is more focused on the Raider TV aspect of the Red&Black. This field trip gives schools all over Long Island a chance to present and show off how their websites look. It also gives many schools a chance to look and see what they might need to improve on. Towards the end, there is a big assembly with all the categories your school could win a possible award for.
Senior year also consisted of other field trips such as visiting Columbia University with many other journalists to engage in workshop classes to gain learning experience and advice from professionals.
Gonzales made a connection with one of the professors in attendance, Bonnie Blackman. This had a great impact on her life as Blackman read over her college essay inserting the feedback Gonzales had asked for as someone who doesn’t know her personally.
Gonzales declared a major in Biology and minor in Journalism at Stony Brook. Although the two studies don’t seem like a harmonious pair, the flexibility in her Journalism courses have helped her balance the workload. The two actually coincide on occasion, like when Gonzales wrote an article on the research being conducted in regards to 9/11 survivors and the early stages of dementia. The article even inspired Gonzales to look more into the neurological path of study.
While she may be a sophomore, Gonzales already considers herself old and wise. She told the Journalism students that when you get to college you have more freedom than you may expect. She advised that students work on strengthening their time management skills as those are necessary as you get older.
