Muneebah Umar was named Mississippi High School Journalist of the Year in 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of The Vision newspaper at the Mississippi School for Math and Science. Currently, she is an upcoming senior at Mississippi State University and is a biological science major with a pre-med concentration.

During her time at MSU, Umar has been involved in organizations and research.

“I’ve been really fortunate to be heavily involved in [organizations] these last three years. I think some of my biggest involvements are the Student Association, undergraduate research in biological engineering and biological anthropology, the Jackson Free Clinic Health Ambassadors, and the Honors College,” Umar said.

After she graduates in May 2025, Umar hopes to go to medical school to be a physician. She aims to serve and educate communities and can use the journalism skills she obtained in high school as a physician.

“I’m starting my application for medical school, so that’s the goal. Hopefully, by Fall 2025 I should be entering medical school. I think the specialty I want to pursue is something that I’m not fully sure about yet, but I think one of the biggest takeaways was [that] as a physician, I can really work to serve and educate communities,” Umar said.

“Through journalism, which I was highly involved in in high school, I learned about the importance of simplify language, objective writing, and communication. Those are skills I really hope to transfer as a physician. What field exactly, I’m not exactly sure yet.”

Umar aims to educate and inform others about topics they are interested in, even through medicine.

“Journalism is all about how you can convey the most information as sustained and objectively possible. That’s really transferred over to my writing, both for my classes and also for the research that I do. I feel very skilled in my ability to take complex unknown topics to most people outside of research and condense them in ways that are not only interesting and still impactful, but still understandable by the majority of people,” Umar said.

“Journalism is all about making sure that everyone is aware of things that are important and everybody can understand things that they are interested in. I really hope to convey that and contribute to that even through medicine.”

Umar was editor-in-chief in 2020-2021 and led her team during the difficult times. Being editor-in-chief is one of her favorite memories and one she is proud of.

“I was editor-in-chief during the 2020-2021 school year, so peak COVID. It was fully online and so the biggest thing was just the consistency of it. Everyone was still very interested in contributing and probably one of our most active years. We were publishing nearly every single day,” Umar said.

“One of my favorite memories is about leading a team of students and addressing the challenges that were in. Not only were we able to produce a paper and continue that but we had one of the most successful years the paper had ever seen, despite all of the difficulties I faced. That’s something I’m really proud of and a highlight of my time in high school.”