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Palmer Trinity School senior Isabel Papp is the school’s Silver Knight nominee in Journalism.
She’s going to Northwestern for a double major in journalism and political science. She’d like to be an international correspondent.
She used her work as a volunteer journalist at Islander News in Key Biscayne as her Silver Knight project. She works for the Islander News in the summers. She began the summer before ninth grade and has worked there for four years.
One story she is proud of is her coverage of a local man who studied submarines. Other stories dealt with local issues.
“There is a big seaweed problem in the summer,” she says. “Every year, almost like clockwork, I had to develop stories about them.”
She had fun writing about a huge Miami celebrity, soccer great Lionel Messi, who was supposed to be staying in Key Biscayne over the summer.
“I never met him, but I got to develop a couple of posts about that,” she says.
She also translated stories from their Spanish language publication into English.
At Palmer Trinity, she competes in Model United Nations events.
“I started it on a whim when I was a junior,” she says. “Westminster and Palmer Trinity have a local MUM conference that we do with them.”
She’s attended competitions in Virginia and the Hague in the Netherlands.
“Being closer to the Hague, it gives it a sense of more importance,” she says. “And you feel like an actual delegate for your country. We were tourists too. We went to Amsterdam for a day.”
They were able to sit in on a war crimes trial that has been going on for 20 years dealing with Serbian war ministers and crimes against the Muslim community.
“I met a lot of the mothers of the victims,” she says. “It reinforced what I want to do.
Those are the kinds of stories I want to be telling.”
In the summer of 2022, Papp took a two-week summer journalism program run by the New York Times held at Fordham University.
In middle school she attended Miami Arts Charter in Wynwood for creative writing. She won several poetry awards and was a finalist for a poetry slam at the Adrienne Arsht Center.
But her main creative interest is theater.
“Even when I was in elementary school, I was in something,” she says. “I loved singing when I was a kid. I wrote my college essay on it. I loved musical theater.”
She has been in numerous events at school, including going to district and state theater competitions. This year she received a superior rating for a solo piece she did in the district competition as well as another big award.
“For the One Act Play, I got the award for the All Star Cast Member, which is the award for Best Actor in a one act play,” she says.
This year, they competed at the state event.
Papp runs Palmer Trinity’s gaming club, which is mostly for middle schoolers.
Palmer Trinity has a Diversity and Equity program as part of the Mosaic program. She’s one of the facilitators that goes to homerooms and presents lessons. A recent topic was antisemitism and Islamophobia in America.
Another section was about poverty. Papp says the topic is important to teach at a private school where some students have internalized the idea that people are poor only because they won’t work hard enough.
“With the program, teaching them about people can facilitate empathy,” she says.
This summer, she will be doing an internship in Mexico with Martha Debayle, who runs successful podcasts.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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