Meridian’s foreign exchange student, senior Larou de Jong, will continue to study journalism at the university level. de Jong participated in Meridian’s journalism program this school year and realized she wanted to continue with journalism at the next level. de Jong is from the Netherlands and plans to attend  Kunst & Multimedia Noorderpoort Groningen, which is based in the Province of Groningen in the Netherlands.

“To be honest I never thought I would go into journalism. When everyone in Holland signed in for their new schools, I had one more year to think about what I actually wanted,” de Jong said. “When I took journalism at Meridian, I found that I really liked it and that this was something I wanted to do back home.”

de Jong started to search for schools with journalism programs and found Kunst & Multimedia Noorderpoort Groningen. She had to do an interview over the phone on April 10 and was given a writing assignment that was due the next day in order to see how her writing skills were.

“She had to do an interview in order to get into this school and they were very impressed by all the things she has done here in America as far as with journalism,” Roxanne Thompson, de Jong’s host mom said. “She has already learned some things they will teach so she will be ahead of the rest.”

Many things de Jong learned in Meridian’s journalism program will come back as she continues to learn at her university. The university has even spoken to de Jong about possibly helping them to set up an online news page similar to The Meridian Daily.

“She is planning to keep me in the loop and I’m really pumped about that,” Meridian journalism teacher Sheila Moore said. “I think that’s the most exciting aspect of it, is to be able to see, not that I’m going to be able to understand any of it, but to be able to see what she took from our class and how they’re implementing that in their structure of the site.”