The Daily often does a satisfactory job covering innovative projects that students pursue outside the classroom. It reports on events that students organize and spectacles around campus.

On these issues, The Daily commensurates the newsworthy with the extraordinary. However, more ordinary questions might prove equally as fascinating, for they probe issues that affect us all.

The most memorable phrase from my undergraduate education is laborare est orare: work is prayer. The phrase was once the mantra of medieval monks. It captures the power and the ritual of “work.”

While prayer expresses the thoughts and desires of the spiritual, often in an attempt to work toward realizing certain goals, work focuses our own interests and passions in a way that calls upon our own talents to reach the same pinnacle.

Work is the fundamental manifestation of our free will; it is our chance to inflect our course, to shape the direction of our lives. Yet many loathe it. The idea of “work” on college campuses is the subject of shared commiseration and the object of profanity.

Questions of work – what it is, why it frustrates, and why it fulfills – are prime subjects of professional discourse. Trends in employment, innovation in the workplace, and the variety of jobs people do are all common features in national newspapers and other outlets. Similar questions are relevant for students, though they often elude popular attention.

The Daily should explore the relationship between the work that students do in class and the work that they want to pursue after Northwestern.

Are students looking to apply the lessons of the classroom out in the world? Is the undergraduate experience a lesson in how to think, or are we acquiring practical skills (I am asking this as a student of social science)? What do students perceive as work? Are student groups ‘work’ or are they leisure? And why do students do the work that they do?

Stories about students’ schoolwork might seem bland and uninteresting; moreover, students might read The Daily to avoid thought of “work,” the campus bogeyman.

But these stories can serve a deeper purpose. They can offer insight on otherwise unexplored career paths and classroom opportunities. My roommate took a course last year in which each team of students was required to start a business as their final project.

Engineers design computer games (and other things, I am sure), and I have no clue what theatre majors do, though I am interested enough to read a few hundred words about it.

Beyond satisfying curiosity and offering potential inspiration, these types of stories allow us to better understand Northwestern. We suspect that fascinating things are happening all around us, but we – or at least I – often feel aware of so little. Such is the frustration that inspired Zach Ciszon’s random events blog.

The proposed coverage of “work” necessarily extends to how Northwestern students transition from campus to the professional world. Exploring where students go next speaks to the culture of Northwestern students; it represents what the work that we do here make possible.

Public editor Ben Armstrong is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]