“Are You the Only One?” started as a writing assignment given by Professor of Journalism and Adviser of Student Media Toni Albertson. She asked her multimedia storytelling class to answer the following question: “Keeping in mind the age you are or the age you are turning this year, are you where you want to be in life?”

​It was a timed assignment, leaving everyone little time to overthink their answers. Once it was time to present what they’d written, everyone had the same answer: “No.”

​It was a strange moment. How could 18 students between the ages of 18–28, all coming from different backgrounds, feel the same dissatisfaction as to where they were in life?

The class started to weigh out the factors, ranging from feeling competitive against one another to how people perceived each other on social media. By the end of the discussion, no set answer was agreed on.

​With that in mind, the class decided to reach out and see if this feeling went beyond the classroom. They brought in people from all over campus and asked the same question.

This was the beginning of the project, “Am I the Only One?” Needless to say, no one is ever just the only one.

All students in the course (pictured) participated in the creation of this project.