The PTA Reflections Contest, a nationwide project that allows for students in creative arts to express themselves according to a contest theme, presented awards to students in a ceremony on February 4.

“Basically, I submitted a photograph of a shoot I did in Houston,” senior Jonathan McInnis said. “With a model down there, we went and we found a performing arts building, and we found this little alley, that had granite walls about three feet apart. So we went into it, and we had the big, backlit sky as the background, so I had a picture of her walking down with the reflective granite on the side, it was a picture of her right in the center of the image, and there was about five reflections of her in the walls.”

The Reflections Contest is a creative arts contest that allows students to enter work in fields branching from literature to visual arts for enjoyment and for positive impact.  It began in Colorado in 1969 as a contest for students to express their work and their traits, and it has since grown into a national competition.

“Well, I wrote a short poem,” sophomore Hunter Finner said. “15 lines, about a dream, really, which is what it was all about, about a seed wanting to grow into a big tree.”

Both Finner and McInnis received Awards of Excellence, and they were also the only two entries to proceed to the Texas State level, the results of which will be released on March 1.

“Submitting it wasn’t really overly too hard of work to do,” McInnis said. “The shoot was from a personal shoot, so it wasn’t like oh, this contest is coming up, I might as well go out and shoot an image for it for it, I just picked something that I already had, so it wasn’t too hard, it wasn’t too much of a burden. It was quite neutral because there wasn’t too much of work I had to do for that specific competition.”

“It wasn’t really hard,” Finner said. “It’s a simple poem, but I’m glad other people liked it. It made me feel good whenever they sent out that email saying that I was in the top three percent or so of everybody that turned it in.”

Some participants joined in order to do something they enjoyed and to fulfill a passion.

“Writing is something that I really enjoy and something I’ve been doing for a long time,” sophomore and Award of Excellence winner Sonali Mehta said. “So when I heard about the contest, I figured that I might as well submit something.

Others, while still interested in an art, had other reasons for submitting an entry.

“Well, Miss Harrison didn’t really give us the choice,” Finner said. “But I gladly joined it. I would have joined it anyway if she didn’t make us.”

However, once the decision to join was made, the reasons behind the art came out.

“Well, it was the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking about dreams,” Finner said. “It just kind of clicked whenever I thought about it, about a seed wanting to grow tall, being surrounded by large trees and being so small, not knowing what to do.”