“Ohio?” she said after her family tells her that they’re going to move. “No, Iowa.” All Mariam Keita could imagine about Iowa was cornfields and farms, but she somehow ended up liking it here. “So then I was online and I looked up Iowa and this corn popped up and I said, I do not want to live on a farm.”
Keita was born in Detroit, Michigan but lived in New York for most of her life. “ I do miss New York because even though Iowa is pretty great, there’s more things you can do in New York,” Keita said. “ You can go to amusement parks and things are closer and there’s more stuff and because there’s so much more stuff there’s more people but more people means more problems.” Even when she isn’t moving to a new state, she’s changing schools often—a total of four times in New York and three different elementary schools in the Iowa City Community School District (Mark Twain, Alexander and Coralville Central).
Despite moving often one thing remains a constant. Keita is looking forward for a particular career in the future. First, Keita wanted to become a surgeon or nurse because she loves helping and supporting other people. Later she realized that to become a surgeon or nurse, it’ll be a lot more schooling and you’ll have a person’s life in your hands and there’s a lot of responsibility on you, so she scratched that idea. But after becoming more engaged into reading and writing, now she wants to become a journalist.

After a couple of years when Keita moved to Iowa, she met Adama Katile ’22 at a family gathering who is her cousin and best friend. Katile said that Keita helps her a lot with writing, especially on essays or assignments that requires difficult writing. “She writes really good” Katile said. “ She helps me with a few assignments where I have to word some things differently. She is my go to person when I’m trying to write a report.” In seventh grade, she wrote a short story based on a historical time. Keita said she wrote a lot of short stories, but not so much of full stories. “Writing is just a movie on pages,” Keita said. “Writing is a thing I really like so I mean I didn’t want to do fiction stuff, I wanted to do real people and real life.”
The reason why Keita is taking foundations of journalism is because she is trying to find what she really enjoys to write and what type of journalist she wants to be in the future. Even though she isn’t sure what type of journalist she wants to be at this moment,  she is leaning towards social justice or something similar to Humans of New York. Either way, she definitely knows that she’ll want to continue writing stories and articles in the future. “People who usually don’t have a voice that’s why journalism was the best one, people who feel like they don’t matter and you can make them feel recognized.”