With more free time in second semester, seniors Anuj Changavi and Iman Laique have poured their time into a journalistic hobby — blogging.

When Changavi started his blog “Stuck in the Middle” in the midst of junior year, many of his friends advised him against the idea because they thought it was an unnecessary distraction from school work; however, throughout the next year, his blog became a creative outlet for him to manage his stress levels along with incorporating his love for sports. Though “Stuck in the Middle” originally focused on sports, Changavi eventually started writing about topics such as politics.

“Sports has always been a passion of mine, so I was inspired by my favorite sports columnists,” Changavi said. “As I got more into blogging I realized I could write about many different things and I branched out from there.”

Now finished with college applications, Changavi is dedicating more time to his blog than ever, and he writes a post whenever he has free time.

“I just write what’s on my mind, when I feel like it,” Changavi said. “A lot of times, though, I’m just sitting at home doing nothing when I think of something to write about.”

For her part, Laique only recently started her blog at the beginning of senior year. Titled “Answers in Your Ceiling,” her blog focuses more on her personal lifestyle and story-like experiences.

“For a long time, writing was a hobby for me, but it was a private hobby, and I was kind of insecure about it,” Laique said.

Laique had been thinking about starting a blog for some time, but it was Changavi’s encouragement that pushed her into actually starting it.

“I decided to start my blog because I think a lot of stuff I write about are things that people think about but no one talks about,” Laique said. “My blog is basically storytelling: stuff I’ve seen, stuff I’ve experienced and sometimes even stuff my friends have gone through.”

Since Laique often writes about touchy subjects such as mental health issues, one challenge she often faces is feeling like she should filter her writing out of fear of possible judgments.

“For me, it can be hard to write on my blog because I am constantly thinking about what people are going to think about my blog so I’m very cautious,” Laique said. “Much of my writing is for myself but also a big part of it is how people respond to it.”

Putting out opinions is, of course, risky.

Changavi remembers reading multiple hate comments under his posts, which he then responded to through additional blog posts.

Nevertheless, Changavi has also been touched by the comments many of his friends have left under his blog posts.

“I got these long paragraph comments from people I haven’t talked to since kindergarten saying that they read my blog post and they liked it,” Changavi said. “That’s really touching.”

Both Laique and Changavi said that on balance, blogging has been a beneficial hobby, and it has helped them both in deciding their future career paths and in improving their general writing abilities.

“For me, I knew from day one that I was going to do a writing career,” Changavi said. “Writing this blog just further confirms it; let’s just see where it goes.”