Confessions of a Chronically Over-Word-Count Editor

If you know me, you know that The Student is my life. Being a Managing Opinion Editor has basically become my entire personality — and yes, I am aware that I’m kind of annoying about it and, for that, I am very sorry. For the past two years, I have spent nearly every Tuesday night from around 6:30 p.m. to midnight, sometimes later, in the newsroom. In that time, I’ve learned a lot — about myself, about writing, and about the strange and deeply meaningful community I somehow found.

What I Learned About Myself

I learned way too many things about myself in these past two years that are going to stick with me for a long time. I can’t be concise, which is something I will need to work on. I’m not known for my brevity. Some might say I am philosophically opposed to it; others might say I just like watching editors cry. The fact that my articles have to stay under 2000 words has always given me a very specific kind of heart palpitations. The fact that this part about staying brief is a whole paragraph says a whole lot about me. 

When then-Managing Opinion Editors, Olivia Tennant ’27 and Elaine Pan ’27, both went abroad this spring, they handed me the keys to the Opinion section and said, in spirit if not in words, “good luck, don’t crash it.” I love them both, and I remain deeply grateful that they trusted me enough to let me try flying this thing at all. Because suddenly I wasn’t just editing; I was the pilot, the flight attendant, the ground crew, and the unfortunate passenger in the back loudly announcing that we were, in fact, experiencing turbulence. The cockpit was just going to be me, a lot of fear, and one newly “hired” editor: Syla Steinman ’29, who, frankly, has more editorial instinct in her left eyebrow than I will ever possess in my entire body. And then — like a gift from the journalism gods — my other friend, Joey Supik ’27, migrated over from Sports to Opinion partly. Thanks for helping me, Joey. I learned that I could never do it alone. And of course, much love to Lucas Silva ’28 and Odessa Ikels ’28, whom the three of us hired this semester. We couldn’t have done it without you both.

In the middle of all that, including the sleep deprivation and general goat-wrangling, I made a vow: I was going to become the best damn Managing Opinion Editor this paper had ever seen. This , in hindsight, was not just ambitious but fully delusional. A million terrifyingly competent people had held that position before me like Editor-in-Chief Edwyn Choi '27, and the bar was not just high — it was inhumanly perfect. In reality, I felt like a feral creature armed with a Google Doc, InDesign, and sheer panic. I did not meet that goal due to mostly personal reasons — partly because I went actually off the rails for a while — and partly because I was still trying to figure out AP style at the beginning; yes they are equal in weight. I was really unsure about really basic conventions that now are very obvious. In hindsight, I also think I’m not giving myself enough credit — I do understand AP style now, and I improved a lot over the course of my tenure, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time. Still, I’m someone who’s used to meeting the expectations I set for myself, and falling short of that was very frustrating. But I also think that’s where I learned the most. I had to get comfortable with not being the best right away, with learning in public, and with producing work that wasn’t what I would consider to be perfect. And honestly, that might be the most important lesson I could have taken from this experience — because it forced me to grow in a way that just succeeding easily never would have.

But I also began this entire journey operating with what can only be described as an aggressively inflated sense of capability. I became an Assistant Opinion Editor having written nothing for The Student. I walked into the newsroom having very little evidence that I understood how any of it actually worked. I learned very quickly that I did not, in fact, know how to edit. At all. I had no real technique beyond staring at a draft and thinking, “Oh my, that is … not great,” and then hoping someone more competent would step in and rescue it. I still don’t think I have some formal theory of editing — but I am better now. At the very least, I’ve moved from “confused observer” to “confused participant,” which is growth.

What I learned from all of this is less about becoming a “good editor” in any clean, resume-friendly sense, and more about what it actually means to hold responsibility in a space built on words. Leadership is rarely composed, even when it externally looks like it is. Most of it was improvisation, damage control, and hoping InDesign wouldn’t crash at the wrong time. I learned that you do not actually become confident and then do the work; you do the work while actively feeling unconfident and hope that the competence eventually catches up. And I learned that editing is not about having the right answers immediately; it is about learning how to sit with other people’s ideas long enough to understand what they are really trying to say, and then helping them say it better without stripping their original voice.

I learned that writing is hard, especially when you do it nearly every week. But also that it keeps me sane in a way I didn’t expect when I first joined. I like my routines. Over winter break, I wrote what felt like a ridiculous number of pieces simply because I had nothing else to do, which is both impressive, according to some, and very concerning to me in hindsight. I also learned that I will, on occasion, write articles instead of doing my homework — not because I have time at all, but because I very much do not want to do my homework, and writing feels like a more socially acceptable form of avoidance. And perhaps against some people’s beliefs, I do write all of my articles with my own hands and thoughts.

I’ve also learned that you have to be okay with reactions to your writing, both negative and positive, which is perhaps the hardest part. And most of all, you have to be okay with the fact that once you publish something, it stops belonging to just you — it enters a space where it will be read, misunderstood, argued with, praised, dismissed, and reshaped in ways you can’t control.

But more than anything, I learned that I am not separate from this paper in the way I once thought I was. I used to think I was just passing through. But instead, I got shaped by it in ways I didn’t anticipate. It forced me to be accountable when I wanted to disappear and present even when I felt completely unqualified to be. And somehow, through all of that, I became someone who can actually do this work. 

Community 

I learned a whole lot about community and what it means to have one. I genuinely don’t know why I joined. I never wanted to be a journalist. I wandered into the club fair freshman year sleep-deprived and profoundly impressionable. Someone probably handed me a sticker or offered me a cookie, and I imprinted like a baby duck. I was already a nervous mess, and somehow the newsroom just stuck.

Then everything happened at once, like Amherst looked at me and said, “what if we gave you all your character development in a single semester?” Sophomore fall, I was drowning in coursework, depressed, anxious, chronically dehydrated, freshly broken up with (twice), and simultaneously watching my friend group dissolve in the infamous sophomore shuffle. And then somehow sophomore spring was worse. Everyone in the newsroom knew — the newsroom always knows. They knew everything about me. I only missed two weeks of writing this year. Even in the middle of everything, I was still showing up because it was the one thing that was constant, and they were all there when I did. They supported me when I was falling apart, and they supported me when I was falling in love, which is arguably a more confusing state to manage in a newsroom.

And then there are the bits that somehow become legend: successfully hiding Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Michael Mason ’25’s face in the spring 2025 commencement issue and the fall 2026 homecoming issue. Journalism is powerful. Thank you to the design team and the so-called secret society for allowing that to live, breathe, and permanently enter the lore. If you are just finding out about that now, my bad guys. That is, genuinely, one of my proudest contributions to this paper. Pulitzer Prize committee, if you are reading this, I am available.

There were also the emails from alums who thought we were ruining civilization when I used the wrong latin version of alumnae (sorry I don’t know latin), the battles fought over edits that felt like moral crises late at night, and the collective experience of going to the president’s house together in the fall (I love you, Michael Elliott, and I hope you love me too).

And somewhere in all of that, I stopped feeling like the new kid outside the circle, waiting to be let in. Instead, I was just in it. One of them. I still don’t entirely know how it happened but at some point the newsroom stopped feeling like a place I visited and started feeling like a place I belonged. The newsroom took me in, tolerated my nonsense, and gave me something I didn’t know I was missing: a real sense of community in Amherst that I have not found anywhere else. What I learned from all of this is that community is rarely something you consciously find — it’s something you accidentally build by showing up over and over again until you are no longer an outsider to it. I thought I was just joining an activity, something to fill time, something to figure out how to do well enough to survive. But over time, what I got was something entirely different: a group of people who saw me at my most exhausted and most unfiltered and still made space for me anyway.

That’s what I will take with me most: that community is not something you are granted once you are good enough, or ready enough, or composed enough. And once you are inside it, it changes the way you understand what “home” can mean.

You Should Join The Student

Join The Student. 

I know that from the outside it can sometimes feel inaccessible. I understand that feeling more than I can explain. But it shouldn’t be that way. Maybe at some point it did feel like that. Maybe at some point it was built a little too tightly, a little too insular. But that is not what it has to be, and it is not what it should become. Writing is not an elite skill, or a closed circle, or something you need permission to try. It is just a practice of paying attention and learning how to say what you see, even when you are unsure you’re saying it well. And this paper, at its best, is built on exactly that: people willing to try.

That is the version of The Student I hope continues — one that stays alive because new people keep choosing to step into it and make it theirs too.

And right now I am, genuinely, emotionally unwell about leaving the version of this that exists in my memory. I’m crying in the corner of the newsroom in the bright orange chair that will be put in a dumpster after this semester. I don’t want to say goodbye to this physical space, or to the people who made it feel like home, or to the version of myself that only exists because this place existed around me.

But that’s the point, in a way I don’t fully want to admit. That it doesn’t actually end here. That what this place gave me isn’t trapped in these walls or this chair or these late Tuesday nights — it’s something I carry forward, even as the space changes and everything shifts into something new.

I don’t even want to finish this sentence. But I will anyway. Because I learned here how to keep writing even when I don’t want to, even when it hurts a little, even when it feels like I’ve said everything I can say.

So here it is: thank you, goodbye for the semester. And if you’re thinking about it at all, come join us.