May 8, 2017 will mark one year since I published my first article on the "Odysseyonline." Matter of fact if you're reading this the day it's published you will be celebrating with me on my one year anniversary! As a writer, I figured it would make sense to talk about what I learned from Odyssey and what I achieved throughout this year.

I remember it so vividly. May 8th, 2016. The day my first article went live. I wish I could say I had beginner's luck and my article took off, but that wasn't the case. I think I had around 20 views, which to me was cool enough because 20 people wanted to read my article or at least view it and starting off I didn't think much of it. It wasn't until weeks down the line before I had my first "Banger" (that's what I like to call articles that do rather well). This particular article attracted a lot of feedback and some people agreed and others didn't. Either way, there was some major backlash from the article. This particular article was called "Please Stop Asking What My Tattoos Mean." You can see why it would attract some people claiming "Why did you get tattoos if you don't want people to ask questions?" or "It's your fault for getting visible tattoos". All points that could be true, but I'm not looking to get into that right now. Save it for your own response article to my article, haha. Anyways, that article got 288 shares and over 1000 total views. That was absolutely ludicrous to me because going from 20-60 views and maybe 5-10 shares it meant a lot. All the way to almost 300 shares and 1000+ views was breathtaking. I couldn't fathom the fact that many people shared my article and even looked or read it. That was when I learned my first lesson from Odyssey.

Odyssey has the power to spread a message - good or bad. When you stop and think about my little tattoo article reaching 1000+ people or more imagine if that article was about cancer research or an article about anti-bullying. The power Odyssey has is unreal and I hope to see it be used for promoting good messages and not just political content since I know that is a hot topic in the media ever since the primaries for the presidents.

Flash back to the first month of writing for Odyssey, The community that I was in was looking for a Contributing Editor (CE). I was approached by my ME (Managing editor) who is no longer with us, but she said that she enjoyed the content I was providing and she appreciated how consistent and interactive I was with the community. Within two days, I became the new Contributing Editor. That was only after writing for a month so you can see opportunities are present in this company. Work hard and long and things will fall into place.

It was about this time I learned my second lesson.

Odyssey will teach you the essentials you need to know and your higher up advisors will teach you more than you expected. After becoming CE I was interacting with my ME a lot more and I was gaining more and more reputable knowledge that I could eventually apply to a career in Journalism as my ME actually was a registered Journalist who now works for a news station. I choose to keep her name private for the sake of her privacy. I learned a lot from this individual and even after her when we got our new ME he told me so many new things about website traffic and how certain social media sites have different algorithms and how to make the most of them. So, if you're skeptical about joining Odyssey because you feel you don't know enough or you might not get the most out of the experience, I can assure you that is not the case here.

I know that there are more things that I have achieved through Odyssey and more lessons learned, however, I want to start to end it here before this article becomes too long and starts to look like a very detailed resume! If you're still on the fence about joining Odyssey, I'd say go for it! There is no commitment so if you don't like it or just find out that writing isn't for you, that's okay! At least you gave it a go. If you're interested, however, I will leave the links down below and if you want to join and are from the Philadelphia area or the greater Philadelphia area, make sure to apply and put "Manayunk" as the community you wish to join!