Exit Letter: A Long Time in Morrow

In some tucked-away corner of the Morrow basement, Shawn Mendes echoing out from where the rest of the newsroom seems to be doing karaoke, I am, despite my best efforts to start early, following tradition by beginning to write this piece only now. At least I’ve started mine a few hours before Ryan Yu ’22 (from whom I lifted a few words for this paragraph) did when he wrote his.

To be really honest, I’ve lifted more than just a few words from Ryan over the course of my time at The Student. When I first stepped into the newsroom, he, Scott Brasesco ’22, and Becca Picciotto ’22 made the paper seem like a real workplace, a unified enterprise that reminded me, with its extraordinary organization and absurd time commitment, of my high school robotics team. When I was a freshman in high school, it was the commitment and the knowledge so obviously present in the seniors who led the club that made me join, desperate to learn from them. As a first year at Amherst, it felt only natural to follow that feeling again.

From Ryan, Becca, Scott, Theo Hamilton ’23, Lynn Lee ’23, and so many other senior editors at The Student, I learned so much that I can’t possibly recount it all here. It will have to suffice to say that it was a lot, that I think about what they taught me every time I open the newspaper’s Slack, make a comment on a writer’s piece, or do so much as produce a paragraph break, transitional sentence, or apostrophe in my own writing.

In one sense, that’s what I mean when I say I took more than just words from Ryan. More than any of my classes that semester, it was the newsroom that taught me how to write. (Even if I often, like right now, quite flagrantly violate their dicta. Sorry, guys!) In another sense, though, I think the effect of Ryan and that newsroom on me has been much larger. The seriousness with which they took editing has inspired my own belief in the practice — it is ultimately what sustains and improves on this thing, made out of words, that we produce.

That first semester, I had a radio show during the 1 a.m. slot on Wednesday mornings. I would leave the newsroom at about 12:50 a.m., energized from hours of working together with those seniors who seemed to know everything. Then, at 2 a.m., I found myself unable to return to my dorm. After all, people were still working in the newsroom. I went back just to sit, do whatever small tasks were asked of me, and listen to Ryan. More than once, I sat that way until the sun rose.

Indeed (another Ryan word), I began to identify the newspaper with that group of people. Even now, when someone talks about The Student I take the name as referring not only to the editors I work with now but those past seniors. In some way, despite our total lack of connection, we are all part of the same thing.

Here’s, maybe, an illustration. There are probably 20 people in the newsroom right now — a few sections are done, some are getting close, and a few have a ways left to go. About normal for this time Tuesday. The first time I walked into the newsroom, in the first month of my first year, the scene was pretty similar, but only one face — my Co-Editor-in-Chief Kei Lim ’25 — has continued, every week since my very first, to remain.

Fundamentally, that might be what’s craziest about the phenomenon that is this newspaper. It’s located so clearly in all of the people who populate our little newsroom, and it wouldn’t exist if even a few of them decided, one week, that they wouldn’t show up. It’s tenuous in that way, dependent on the continuous commitment of a few people who, even if they do for some reason decide to show up every single week for three and a half years, disappear without exception once they graduate. This paper that I’m helping to produce tonight shares exactly two names with the first issue I worked on, but we still call it The Student. The Student has existed since 1868 (long time), even as it replaces every single one of its parts every four years. I think it is this memory, the accumulated commitment of so many different people over time, that gives the newsroom the special kind of air that it has. (That and probably the carpet.)

The list of people I can personally thank for helping this paper, the most important thing I do, to continue to exist has to start with every person who has spoken on the record for us — without whom we would have no stories to tell.

It continues: Eleanor Walsh ’25, Sonia Chajet Wides ’25, and Caelen McQuilkin ’24E built the Features section while Kei and I were still working in Opinion, modeling for me what it means to live committed to the project of storytelling through journalism. When I first started editing news pieces, it was Leo Kamin’s ’25 work more than anything else that taught me how to write the news. And every face in the newsroom, from my first year to now, has given the newsroom the special energy it only has when we are all together. It’s hard to describe the feeling of being in the newsroom and surrounded by editors. We really are unified, all talking about the same things, all working with the same motivations. It’s a little village where, by the end of the night, the impossible will have happened. From nothing we produce a paper, 16 or 28 or 32 pages, and send it to our (incredibly flexible) printer at The Springfield Republican. Four school years of this and I still can’t believe it.

Around the time I started editing, Ryan and Becca built this house from scratch. In the wake of the erasure of history wrought by Covid, they created the conditions of possibility for this newsroom with all of its people, all of its memory. They were my first role models, and I still feel their presence every time I walk into the newsroom — where’s Ryan’s ocarina, I ask, and why is someone else sitting in Becca’s chair?

Okay — almost done. June Dorsch ’27 and Naima Mohamed ’27, our senior managing editors — I don’t want to imagine what this semester would have been like without your tirelessness and your belief. I am inspired by you every single week. And, united with the efforts of Michael Mason ’25, I feel not only faith in, but extreme excitement for the future of The Student. I know you will carry it forward stronger than it was before.

Finally, Kei. There are no words for you, who I have trusted so completely for so long. I’m so stoked for retirement with you.