Last week I travelled over to Irvine to speak to some third year pupils about my career so far in journalism and explain how a newspaper works.

After being contacted by my old Modern Studies teacher, Allana Howie, I was more than willing to head along and give the youngsters an insight into what we do, how we do it and what it takes to be a reporter.

In my 35 minute chat, I explained how we go about finding stories, positioning on the front page, court rules and regulations as well as my time working at the Commonwealth Games and with the CelticLIVE mobile phone app.

It's always a pleasure to speak to children about the industry and if one of the pupils decides to embark on a career in journalism then it was time well spent.

The children described the experience and sent through some quotes of how they thought they chat went with one saying 'I thought working for a local paper would be boring but he had a lot of exciting stories' and another saying ' I think it sounds like a good job but you have so much to do, it must be so hard writing lots of stories every week, it must also be scary in case you make a mistake and get something wrong'.

Coincidentally, the chat coincided with exactly two years since my first front page story.