Arielle Coambes, daughter of Nicki and Jeff Wood of Covington Ga., was recently honored as President of the Georgia College Press Association (GCPA) on Feb. 4. Coambes is currently a sophomore writing and linguistics major, justice studies minor at Georgia Southern University (GSU) in Statesboro, Ga.

Coambes serves as the editor-in-chief of the George-Anne student newspaper at GSU. The George-Anne recently attended the GCPA Conference in Athens, Ga., winning awards in the Four-Year Division-A category. The awards included first and third place for best news article-investigative, first place for general advertising excellence, second place for best photograph and third place for best entertainment feature.

Coambes looks forward to implementing her ideas along with the other GCPA board members. Her goals are to help reinvigorate the structure of the GCPA board as well as implement a new system will allow colleges within the state to share content, much like a wire service.

"It will be for colleges who want to bring news from other areas of the state to their students," said Coambes. "They will be able to update their students from the on-the-ground perspective."

Coambes graduated from Alcovy High School in Covington, Ga., class of 2010, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Paw Print High School Newspaper her senior year. Coambes' other high school extra-curricular activities included football and basketball cheerleading from freshman to senior year as well as elite competitive cheerleading at United Storm.

After graduating from college, Coambes plans to go to law school for media or corporate law. Her biggest influences include her mom, Nicki Wood and GSU Media Director, John Harvey.

"Our advisor, John Harvey is definitely the biggest influence of my life," said Coambes. "He has a lot of knowledge and experience in journalism especially student journalism and I really look up to him."