She flips a page of one of her past yearbooks. She breathes in as a glossy smell still permeates the room. 

These hundreds of pages are incomparable to the wealth of experience Coppell High School junior Round-Up yearbook editor Priyanka Bhutani has accumulated. For more than four years, Bhutani has learned the ins and outs of creating a yearbook, but more importantly, she found her calling in writing.

Bhutani’s yearbook career started in her seventh grade year at Coppell Middle School North. Her first year on staff she was the quote editor, and in eighth grade she took on the role of co-editor-in-chief along with current CHS junior Jamie Cameron.

Usually, media classes like Round-Up, The Sidekick and KCBY are offered to grades 10 and up, but Bhutani became a ninth grade helper for Round-Up, CHS’s yearbook program. As a freshman, she worked in the People’s section and got a head start in her yearbook career. As a sophomore, she worked as a staffer for the People’s section and in her junior year, she is the chrono-copy editor, where she takes photos, assigns stories and edits staffers’ stories.

As a sophomore staffer working in the People’s section, Bhutani was tasked with portrait-checking and finding quotes from CHS students. She was later assigned to write for the section, and her knack for writing prompted her to write even more.

“That’s when I really found my interest in writing,” Bhutani said. “Writing stories was something I felt I was really comfortable in rather than getting quotes. I like to challenge myself with writing stories. Once I learned the format and everything I really got interested, and my leaders were actually the ones who told me ‘we’re gonna start assigning you more stories, because we like the way you write.’”

Bhutani, however, has decided to leave yearbook next year, choosing to concentrate on her other job as the team lead for a Coppell ISD internship.

The CISD student internship program is part of the communications and community engagement department and was started in the 2020-21 school year. The internship was an opportunity for students to use their talents to help share CISD’s story. 

Bhutani was selected to apply for this internship by her former audio/visual arts and technology teacher and current yearbook adviser Jenna Grinnan. 

“Last year, we were asked by the media team at CISD to recommend students for a potential internship, who we felt like would be a good fit for a social media internship,” Grinnan said. “For me, that means a responsible leader: that means someone who can be trusted to be posting stuff for CHS or CISD. So, I recommended a few students, but Priyanka was the first one that came to mind because she is so responsible. She is just such a great young lady to have that responsibility, and she thrives with leadership.”

Bhutani’s internship journey began in her sophomore year when she was a student intern. By the second semester of her sophomore year she was promoted to team lead. At the end of her sophomore year, she was named Coppell Chamber of Commerce student of the month for her work in the program. She continued on as team lead into her junior year, where she currently works with the other interns to help them write their stories, create content and edit their stories. As an intern, Bhutani wrote six stories that are published in the CISD Our Story magazine.

“Part of her internship duties is to coordinate the program, touch base with the students, help funnel the content together, and really be the lead from the student side on the program,” CISD director of communications Amanda Simpson said. “She has done amazing, she has taken on a lot of responsibilities. She, even before we started the internship program, had reached out to us because she had said that she likes to write. Considering everything that has been going on with COVID and the school year she really has done a great job in helping us develop the program.”

Bhutani’s successful work as a CISD intern can be credited to her amiable personality.

“She’s an amazing writer, and she’s got a really good eye for what graphic design is supposed to look like and keeping that on point,” Simpson said. “She’s grown so much as a writer, but she has that kind of indefinable quality of just being able to adapt, learn and figure things out on her own. She’s also very creative. Because she is so relationship-focused, she’s a very good help at finding good stories or finding sources for stories or really just kind of having the pulse of what’s going on, especially at the high school. I would describe her as warm, engaging, incredibly smart, very creative and willing to do whatever it takes to help.”

Follow Sri Achanta (@sriachanta_) and @CHSCampusNews on Twitter.