Every year, Mercer's Center for Collaborative Journalism hosts a camp to get students from all around the country interested in journalism.
This year's theme for the center is food.
Mercer brought in people from the community to share their favorite dishes in a potluck for the students food project.
Our Junior Journalist, Anna Brooke Keisler, went to see how these students were focusing on becoming the future of the media.
High school students from around the nation are gathering at Mercer to get firsthand experience of what the day-to-day life of a journalist is really like.
Rising senior Colette Kania says she's been learning about the media for over 5 years, but never quite like this.
"I never had a teacher who taught us how to do these things, but it was kind of like, 'O,h here's a camera -- figure it out,'" she says.
But the Center for Collaborative Journalism is putting the students through a boot camp of sorts.
They're learning everything from writing to audio and, of course, how to shoot video.
Junior Kalijah Rahming says there are a lot of misconceptions about how the job really works.
"People think that it's easy. It's actually quite hard sometimes because, especially with taking photos, you have to properly set it up and that can be difficult because you have to account for skin tones and you have to account for lighting," she laughs.
But it didn't take long for her to focus in and get the hang of things!
"When you get in the zone when you're actually there, it's so freeing, in a sense," Rahming says.
She says her passion comes from the ability to make an impact in her community.
"Just like Kalijah, I chose journalism because I want to make a difference, and that's exactly what Mercer is doing here at the Center for Collaborative Journalism," Junior Journalist Anna Brooke Keisler says.
Every year, the school picks a theme for their students to focus their stories around, last year's being music.
"And so for the next year, we will be looking at food, we will be looking at access to food, health issues about food, and the history and culture of food, and we thought it would be really fun to kick that project off with our high school campers," Interim Director, Debbie Blankenship says.
Because what better way to reach people's hearts than through their stomachs?
Each of the students will be ending the camp by turning in a package of their work including a video, picture, and written story to showcase their growth.