Lucy Jackson made a point to arrive alone.

Jackson, of Los Angeles, was one of three students from Harvard-Westlake attending the National High School Institute – Journalism at Northwestern University. She arrived in Evanston the night before the program began and stayed with her brother, who attends NU.

“I was very wary to make sure not to hang out with them,” Jackson said. “I knew I had to step out of the comfort zone and make other friends.”

Of the 80 high schools represented in the program, six schools have more than one student.

Ariel Rothfield and Alix Cohen both attend Cypress Bay High School in Florida, but they were not close friends. The two are leaving the program with a stronger friendship and a stronger working relationship.

“Alix and I are going to be working together a lot next year so coming here together really helped us communicate better,” Rothfield said.

The two are also confident that their experience at cherubs will benefit their school paper.

“The experience will definitely help us because when we want to teach our paper something, we’ll already be on the same page, and we won’t have to teach each other first,” Cohen said.

Elise Butler and Ashlee Fukushi are close friends at St. Paul Academy & Summit School in Minnesota. At the program, however, the two wanted to downplay their friendship.

“We didn’t promote that we were really good friends because you don’t want to alienate people, you want to make new friends,” Butler said. “I didn’t want to limit myself to the one person I already knew.”

On Monday night layouts at Harvard-Westlake, Jackson spends long hours working with Cathi Choi and Andrew Lee. The three knew each other really well but were not good friends.

“It’s exciting to grow together in something that we will all do for the next year of our lives,” Choi said. “Growing together, learning together, being at the same level with each other and getting the John Kupetz jokes together will be something we can share our memories about in the newspaper room on late Monday night layouts in the upcoming school year.”