Cella Rousseau '11 visited the Grade 8 class in January 2019.

CAREER TALK WITH CELLA ROUSSEAU '11

By Katie Robinson, Grade 8

Last month, Cella Rousseau '11 came to Balmoral Hall and spoke with the Grade 8 class about her career and life path. Ms Rousseau is a BH lifer who grew up here and adored activities such as voice and drama. She has always been a storyteller and loves to make people laugh. School helped her embrace those talents and her creativity, which led her to Creative Communications at Red River College, where the groundwork was laid for her career as a writer.

Ms Rousseau said it was a great program for her, and she majored in journalism. True crime journalism became her passion, and she was able to have a few crime stories published. Then, an exciting journalism opportunity arose for Ms Rousseau with Winnipeg Sun. She loved her job there, but, after a while, she wanted to try something different. Around that time, positions at iMore, a tech journalism company, opened. This sounded interesting to her because it required her to review photography products. She found her job fun and interesting, and she loved playing around with the new "toys." Not long after, she was invited to attend a consumer electronics show to review some of the products there. That ended up being the place where she really figured out what she wanted to do as a career.

After the show, she realized that she had found a new passion for technology, as she loved to review and test gadgets, but she kept thinking of even more ways she could share her creative abilities with the world.

All of this led Ms Rousseau to write her own book, and she became the author of Damsel. The book is about female serial killers and the idea that females can be just as "dark" as males. Ms Rousseau had a deadline of 10 months to write her book. She had to write every day, and then her book was published in 2015. Following the writing of the book, she designed three videos to promote it. Of all of her accomplishments, she is most proud of her book because it made McNally's Bestseller List and it gave her a lot of fulfilment.

Ms Rousseau discovered her love of writing when she reviewed apps and technology, but she really embraced her passion and talents when she found her writer's voice. This voice helped her to start an award-winning positivity blog called HelloRousseau, which she loves to work on because she gets to combine her passions for writing, photography, and technology.

Ms Rousseau took extra steps to nurture her creativity throughout her career path. She also didn't set out to do just one job; she wasn't limited. Ms Rousseau reminded us: "You don't have to do anything. You do the things you want to do and what makes you most happy. ... As long as you have a creative idea, you can do anything." In other words, always run the extra mile.

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Balmoral Hall School

630 Westminster Ave. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada  R3C 3S1
Tel: (204) 784-1600 | Fax: (204) 774-5534 | info@balmoralhall.ca
Charitable Registration No. 12994 3932 RR0001
Our mission at Balmoral Hall School is to inspire girls’ imagination and the courage to excel, to reach, to lead, to care.

We are a nondenominational independent day and boarding school, educating students from Junior Nursery to Grade 12.