I’ll be quite honest, I didn’t expect to be here working for this paper. I didn’t even expect to be in Oshkosh in general. 

I started my college career in Minnesota in 2020 planning to be an economics major. That quickly went into the gutter once I took a calculus class my freshman year. Yikes, that first exam! What in the world was I thinking?

I always enjoyed writing so the next natural progression was to look at journalism being my major. When I say I enjoy writing it might be an understatement. When my family moved during my senior year of high school we collected around three (My mom says it might’ve been more) trash bags worth of notebooks filled with my little sports stories, predictions and results from experiments I’d conduct on Madden, NBA2K or any other sports video game you can think of. Some of these notebooks probably dated back to 2008 when I was 7. Sometimes I’ll find one from around then and just think about how bad my handwriting was in first grade. 

It was pretty clear I wanted to write about sports once I became a journalism major at Minnesota and I needed to find out what that’d look like for me. I quickly discovered that the Big Ten is stingy and getting access to cover those sporting events is pretty difficult. I pivoted to find other ways to be creative. If you saw my work from Minnesota you’d probably be surprised considering I’ve only written about sports here at the Advance-Titan, but most of my stories were about local artists, musicians, DJs and composers in the Minneapolis area. Once I discovered that I can enjoy this field outside of sports I finally felt like I was going down the right path.

One thing kind of led to another during the entirety of my junior year in Minneapolis and I eventually decided I’d be spending my final college days at UW Oshkosh.

It was very hard to come to a decision to head to a place that I had very little idea about for my senior year. There were a lot of things however that made this transition easier for me.

Firstly, thank you to our former Arts and Entertainment Editor Mattie Beck for dating my best friend and feeling compelled to introduce me to our Editor-in-Chief Anya Kelley, Managing Editor Kelly Hueckman and former Editor-in-Chief  Katie Pulvermacher a week before the fall semester started and collectively convinced me to join the paper. Also shoutout to the goofiest interview I’ll ever have in my life, hopefully, thanks to Anya and Kelly. Thankfully I met the amount of pull-ups required to be a sports editor.

Thank you to Nolan Swenson and Jacob Link for showing me the ropes of the sports section when I first arrived in the office. Thank you to Nolan Andler and Jacob for helping me out with the sports section this semester, and to the handful of students that needed to write a piece for their classes.

Also to everyone else involved here, everyone was awesome in making me feel accepted in this previously unknown place for me. From the production nights where I was there until 3 a.m. to the ones where I got to catch the second half of the Bucks game and got random angry emails from someone who’s lost the plot, I’d do it all again. Most of the A-T staff has been here longer than my measly single school year, but everyone should know that the A-T is a great place and I’m shocked there aren’t more people involved.

I often get the question, “Why would you transfer here from a school like Minnesota?” To answer this question one last time, trust me. I made the right choice and the A-T is probably the biggest reason why.