Young Voices: Jasmine to Georgetown
- Jerry Wu | Torrey Pines High School Junior
Growing up, Jasmine Criqui and her parents sat at the dinner table every Monday to share and exchange their opinions on the latest local events and world news. Over the years, these weekly discussions have helped her develop a strong passion for exploring and understanding politics – now taking her talents to Georgetown University, where she plans to pursue political science and a minor in journalism.
During her senior year working on the Del Mar Sandpiper, Jasmine has grown to assume the much-needed youth voice as the roving teen reporter. She has tackled several pressing topics, including the environmental climate conference COP26, the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, and student mental health. The much more localized platform has taught Jasmine to take different angles to assess how these issues have impacted San Diego while maintaining her unique student perspective.
“It’s been a great lesson taking news stories that affect the whole nation or the whole world and bringing it down to a local level,” she said. “So localizing stories that are massive news stories covered by newspapers everywhere, and putting kind of a more personal spin on it.”
Meanwhile, Jasmine is also grateful and credits the Sandpiper for providing her a window to be an instrumental young voice in the community, calling for more student activism.
“I think that younger voices have historically been and continue to be overlooked. But I will say that now more than ever, it is vital that we have young voices in politics through opportunities like this,” she said.
Amidst the growing urge for gun control nationwide in response to the most recent instance of mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas last month, she strongly believes in the future of bipartisan legislation improving student safety, citing that bipartisanship already exists in the government.
Even when our nation descends into political partisanship, I agree with Jasmine’s viewpoint for the United States to uphold its responsibility to serve and protect its citizens. Doing so might require a nation to adapt to changing times and make slight alterations to its constitution — restricting access to guns or raising the age limit for people to purchase weapons — yet it allows the voices of the people to be heard, which transcends beyond any political agenda.
For the last two years, I have been a part of my high school’s newspaper, Falconer, which has shown me the importance of these principles through truthful reporting. It is also where I met Jasmine for the first time and noticed the strong confidence and intelligence that she admirably carries. With journalism, I enjoy acting as an advocate to those underrepresented by telling their stories to the rest of society. I cannot wait to serve as another youth voice to test the boundaries of political intricacies and embark upon this new journey to leave an imprint on the community.