Journalism cherubs had the opportunity to pick their own workshops during four sessions held during the five-week program.

“We can’t cover everything in five weeks, so we schedule workshops on more specialized topics that we think some people will be interested in,” program director Roger Boye said.

This year, cherubs participated in 18 workshops that covered topics such as ghostwriting, website design and audio storytelling. The workshops let cherubs learn about unfamiliar aspects of journalism.

Jennifer Calfas, of California, signed up for Profile Writing to learn about in-depth features. Calfas said she had never done a story that involved spending a lot of time interviewing one subject. She enjoyed guest instructor Bret Begun’s story about the day he spent following NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. for a profile.

“I thought it was cool that you can spend so much time with a person,” she said.

Calfas said she now wants to try writing a profile for her school paper.

“I’ll definitely use that class,” she said.

Alex Burnham, of Missouri, took Column Writing because he had never written a column before.

“It piqued my interest,” Burnham said.

Burnham said the workshop taught him things he did not know about columns.

“I learned that it’s not as much about the writer as it is about the story,” he said. “If I become a columnist or a copy editor, I know what a good column would look like.”

Jaime Pier, of Oregon, took the Profile Writing workshop with Begun and guest instructor Cynthia Wang of People magazine. The workshop inspired her to think of new people and ideas to feature in her high school paper.

“The profile writing was a lot of fun,” she said. “I do profile writing at my school and it gave me a lot of cool ideas of people to find and to tell their stories.”

Caitlin Gerena, of Florida, decided to try the TV News Editing workshop.

“I picked that one because it’s different and we don’t have it at my school, and it was something I was interested in,” Gerena said.

Seeing the experiences of a television news anchor was interesting, she said. During the workshop, the cherubs got to use computer programs in Medill’s broadcast studio to put words up on the teleprompters, she said.

“It gave me real-time experience,” she said. “It really showed me what it would be like.”

Gerena said she liked learning what it was like to write, produce and be on camera.

“It’s something you can do with news, but it’s more exciting. It’s high energy,” she said. “It made me realize in college it’s something I might want to do, even just for fun.”