I never intended to join a college newspaper staff when I imagined what the next four years would look like. Though spending the second half of my senior year in my bedroom was not how I envisioned the culmination of high school to look like, either. It’s funny how a pandemic can truly defy the odds, creating positive memories previously unimaginable. Becoming the subject of my reflection four years later.

I was actually a waitlist admit to Northwestern. In a world without a pandemic, where students may not have deferred their first year of college, I don’t think I ever would have been stuck at Howard as many times as I have, waiting for the Purple Line to take me to Evanston. But a phone call in early May truly changed that, though The Daily Northwestern was still never on my radar. 

I’m still truly not sure how I got to the level of involvement that I did during my time at Northwestern. I just know that logging into the fall Student Organizations Fair, I was drawn to how eager the students were to welcome any freshman looking for a way to understand Northwestern despite circumstances keeping us apart. 

At first, I was adamant about staying away from science reporting, having had enough of the subject in my freshman year courses. Instead, I became acquainted with the Evanston community without ever stepping foot in the city. I learned about the Associated Student Government from meetings I attended on my bed. But in reporting for disparate subjects, I learned how unavoidable it was to separate the pandemic from our current lives. How unavoidable it would be to separate our health from our reality. 

I could not have written half of the articles I wrote for The Daily had it not been for the pandemic. And it became my unique way of melding my background and interests with journalism.

But my reflection isn’t about the science and public health reporting I did for The Daily. Or about how I would soon rise up the ranks, serving in the trifecta of managing editor roles. Though all important to the back story, it’s about why I stayed at the college newspaper.

When I came to the design room at the beginning of sophomore year, I felt like I had stumbled upon a circle of life-long friends. While I was planted on the third floor of Norris into weird hours of the night, I thoroughly enjoyed blasting my controversial music taste and marathoning through the Twilight series. Because journalism wasn’t my main field of study, designing the print paper twice a week served as my reprieve from studying for organic chemistry.

The Daily prides itself as a teaching newspaper, with students claiming that they learn more from The Daily than from their Medill classes. As a non-Medill student, it was pretty neat, then, to not only learn to use the whole suite of Adobe Creative Cloud software, but to also learn how to pick up a camera and find myself traveling for sports games for years to come. I have made memories both in the newsroom and across the country that have become the highlights of my Daily tenure and my undergraduate experience.

As a senior in high school looking forward to how my college experience would become, I did not see myself even becoming involved with a college newspaper in the first place. In the newsroom now as a college senior, just a week shy from graduating, I can’t imagine a place more fitting to spend the last moments of my time here at Northwestern.

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