I’ve never had a good memory. A part of the appeal of journalism has been recording as many moments as your notepad, tape and hard drive can hold. It’s also the appeal of hoarding, which I’ll admit to my fair share of doing.

I’m never going to re-watch or re-read any of my interviews from journalism assignments past, but when I see the files sitting on my (very messy) desktop, I’ll indulge myself in sentimentality.

For most of my classmates, Medill’s former Dean John Lavine might be noted for the controversies of his term. But I’ll look at the 12-gigabyte raw video file and remember that he let a nervous freshman question him for an hour about the e-reading devices for a 201-1 final story.

I don’t have a good memory, but looking back at four years, it’s hard to forget the emotional peaks. I’ve shed tears of joy and frustration, had mind-numbing all-nighters and the more frequent vein-popping annoyance at the Evanston weather gods. It’s nice to boast to friends back home in California that I lived through a blizzard, the not-quite- life-threatening but class-canceling experience of Snowpocalypse.

Of course, if I could I would want to change some experiences, mostly academic.  To pick and choose more classes where I could be chiseling stone rather than filling out Scantrons. But there are none that I would want to miss, like friends — brilliant people all so drastically unlike each other but happy to be silly in the same company.  Or four years of triumph seeing hundreds of my fellow students at  Relay For Life or late Wednesday nights at the newsroom editing stories or writing a rant about “Glee.”

I’ve never had a good memory, but looking back at these four years, I’ve had a lot of great ones. Thanks, NU, 2009-13.