She Can and She Will!!

"I can and I will."

Five simple words, yet the significance of those words is what motivates Ashanti Lawson to keep working toward her ambitions.

Ashanti, a past student at St. Catherine High School, is on her very own pathway to one day achieve her own life goals. Currently, Ashanti is a student at the University of Technology majoring in journalism. However, if you were to ask her a few years ago, prior to her entering university, she would have told you she wanted to become a medical doctor or lawyer.

Ashanti fell in love with journalism while attending the Dream Jamaica Summer Camp in 2016. During this period, she was a member of our career exploration cohort. This allowed her to explore a range of college degrees outside of the traditional majors, engage in several educational excursions, and work alongside experts from a number of career fields.

Ashanti's passion and enthusiasm for journalism were discovered during one of our visits to a prominent media house in Jamaica.

"Since that visit, I knew where I needed to be in the future."

As a result of that experience, Ashanti will continue to participate in Dream Jamaica until the conclusion of her senior year of high school. She proudly highlighted in our interview that it was through Dream Jamaica that she was able to pick a professional route, discover the value of teamwork, and ultimately, she learned how to successfully create good relationships outside of an academic setting.

In essence, this young lady is on a meteoric rise to success. During our panel discussion, she described her battles with the pandemic as well as her financial difficulties in affording her tuition. She was determined, though, that these stumbling obstacles would not dissuade her from accomplishing what she was meant to do. As a result, to attain her long-term goal of becoming a major media figure, she is determined to complete all of her courses and pursue opportunities that would help her advance in the profession of journalism.

Thus, she aspires to become a TV reporter in the next five to ten years, with the potential to go to countries such as Russia and Iraq to document topics or news stories for her own news company.