I really don’t know why or how I ended up at the first S&B meeting of my first year at Grinnell; probably, there’s something to be said there for my eighteen-year-old self’s enthusiasm for joining any and every club and organization I could, despite a promise I’d made to myself to do less in college than I had in high school. I can tell you that I didn’t have any grand designs for a journalistic career, although the idea of being paid for my writing certainly appealed. 

Still, since then, I’ve been consistently grateful for and surprised by the unique opportunities I’ve had working for the S&B. It’s rare to be in a position of managing 30-plus fellow students in a professional capacity in an undergraduate job; even rarer is finding a place that respects my creative work enough to develop and edit it seriously for public viewing. This has been a hard job, a strange job, and above all, a weird and wonderful experience that has shaped my Grinnell experience over the course of four ever-changing years. 

It’s been an alien experience for me to look back on my time at the S&B and write it down, almost as if I’m recording myself for an article. It was as if an occult hand had pulled me to the other side of the curtain that had so strictly separated me, in this one way, from the rest of the student body. On this end of the microphone, as it were, I’m not sure what to say; nothing that can fit in a half or full tabloid page could summarize what it’s been like to work here during a tumultuous national election, a College presidential turnover, a pandemic, and the dozens of smaller upheavals that have been my day-to-day work-drivers for years now. 

So, as my final sign-off for the time being, I think I’ll just say this:

Your media is made by people, in good faith or bad, in honest reproduction of facts or not. It’s up to you to approach what you’re told with a critical eye, a skeptical ear, and above all, a sense of curiosity.