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“When they announced it, I couldn’t believe it. When I looked at the other person’s profile, who was also up for it, she was so much smarter than me. Her SAT scores were so much better,” said Horan, a Utica High School senior who was honored with the All-MIPA award by the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association for his work with the school’s newspaper, The Arrow.

It was an honor he said he didn’t expect to receive.

“When they said it, my leg couldn’t stop shaking,” Horan said. “It was a really good feeling to think that all of my hard work had paid off.”

Horan’s work was cut out for him at the beginning of the year when he was named editor-in-chief of The Arrow, UHS’s student newspaper. The previous editor, who is now a student at Northwestern University, not only completed a successful redesign of the paper two years ago, but she was also runner-up last year for the All-MIPA award.

“A lot of people didn’t think I would do as good of a job as she did,” he said. “But I actually was surprised that I finished even higher (at MIPA) than her.”

While Horan was responsible for continuing a highly praised changeover to the publication, fellow UHS senior and All-MIPA yearbook runner-up Michelle Lepinat is still awaiting the student verdict on her project. At the end of the school year, students will receive their copies of The Warrior, which underwent a redesign from a format that had been standard for several years to something that Lepinat said is a bit more eye-popping and attention-grabbing.

“We’ve always had a really traditional yearbook, and this year at camp we decided to do something totally new and different,” she said. “It’s going to be something that no one is going to expect from us. We’re either going to have something people love or they’re going to hate it.”

The honors are a fitting way for the two students to tie up their high school journalism careers, which began as a freshman for Lepinat and during sophomore year for Horan.

“I always felt that I was a strong writer, so I took a journalism class,” Horan said. “When I started I wasn’t actually going to take newspaper, but (teacher Stacy) Smale encouraged me to do it. And I’m glad she did.”

During his time writing and editing for The Arrow, Horan was given several assignments that took him deeper into the school and the community. Earlier this year, when an Eisenhower student was struck by a car driven by a fellow student, Horan took the opportunity to turn it into an article about community safety and the difficulty of placing guardrails along the road.

“I like the pressure of it,” he said. “Yearbook deadlines have a longer time to do. We have about a month. With the newspaper, it’s all things that are going on now.”

Just because the paper works on a tight monthly deadline, however, does not make Lepinat’s job necessarily easy. In fact, both students attest that the role of a yearbook editor is the more difficult job.

“I don’t even know how (Lepinat) does it,” Horan said.

“It takes a lot of time,” Lepinat said. “There are a lot of late nights. Sometimes we’ve even been here as late as 9 p.m., and we’ll order a pizza and get everything done.”

Both students started as contributors to their various publications and moved up in rank to editor positions, in charge of fellow students and responsible for putting out work that either keeps students informed of events throughout the school or creating a lasting work that people will still pull down and read 20 years from now. In addition to being honored for their individual efforts, each publication also received the prestigious Spartan Award.

As both students both plan to head to college in the fall - Horan to Macomb Community College and Lepinat to Michigan State University - they said they both plan to study journalism, although Horan will also focus on teaching and Lepinat will pursue a career in broadcast journalism.

Smale said both publications will need to bring about editors who can fill their shoes.

“It was great to work with both of them over the years. At the beginning of the year, I had to take some time off and I thought that when I returned I would have to start over. But when I came back they were doing great,” Smale said. “I think we’ve been able to build a strong program and they really care about it.”