Renowned Renaissance polymath Leonardo Da Vinci once proclaimed, “For once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”
Flying has become a sort-of refuge for incoming Starrs Mill High School junior Bekah Algaze.
Algaze, 16, was born in Dallas, Texas, and moved to her current hometown of Peachtree City, Georgia, at the age of 2. For the past seven summers, Algaze has attended the University of Oklahoma’s Sooner Flight Academy and while at first the camp was meant to help her overcome her fears of flying, ironically these camps helped to enamor Algaze with the world of aviation.
In high school, Algaze founded her school’s Aviation Club and she is currently working toward obtaining her pilot’s license. Algaze struggled to find the words to describe what it feels like to fly, settling simply on the word “breathtaking,” going on to depict takeoff as all the pressures and stresses of school and everyday life seeming to disappear whenever she’s in the sky.
“At first it was scary; now it’s stress-relieving … it makes me feel at peace with everything,” she says.
In addition to her interest in aviation, Algaze is also heavily involved in journalism at her school. She is currently on the staffs of her school’s yearbook, newspaper and broadcast departments, and she most enjoys her broadcast class. She describes her slate of work for the upcoming school year as daunting, but she says she feels up to the challenge.
Algaze’s connections to Norman can be traced beyond the Sooner Flight Academy. In addition to attending the flight camp, the University of Oklahoma is her father’s alma mater, and she has grown up as a lifelong Oklahoma football fan, describing OU as “my dream school.”
So the stars seemingly aligned when she found the application for OIDJ while searching for journalism camps for the summer. Algaze says that heading into OIDJ, she was quite nervous because it would be the longest she had ever been away from home, but she is also quite excited to get a preview of her future major.
When her flight landed the night before the camp began, Algaze says she was nervous, but determined to take full advantage of the camp’s opportunity. She views OIDJ as a way to learn and get a “head start” on her workload for her junior year.
As she prepares for the future, Algaze knows flying may not be her profession, but she hopes to continue flying in the foreseeable future.
“I want to pursue a career in broadcast journalism, but I will always love flying as a hobby.”
