To be honest with you, I honestly cannot remember how exactly I ended up in Reeve 19 with my name printed in the staff box of the Advance-Titan. Now that may sound strange, but despite not having joined this paper until fall of my junior year here it feels as though I’ve been a part of this paper since I started at UW Oshkosh.

Now, UWO was not my first choice. I wanted to go somewhere big and far to get away from the same faces I’d seen in the hallways at school every day since I was little. But I couldn’t afford to go to a big university and I wasn’t all that interested in having to spend hours driving to and from campus for a weekend at home. So I settled for UWO. A two and half hour drive away from my hometown of Mundelein, Illinois, a place that people can only kind of figure out the location of once I say its near Gurnee Mills and they enthusiastically tell me how much they love shopping there, which I will never understand.

UWO is where I’ve somehow managed to still share classrooms with some of the same people I saw every day in high school and the place where I’ve cycled through multiple combinations of majors and minors while considering transferring more times than I can even count.

After my first meeting with a generic adviser in the UARC where I was told “You don’t need to pick a major yet! Take all these classes to figure out what you want to do. It’ll come to you.” I was given false hope that UWO would somehow speak to me and tell me exactly what I was supposed to do and become. It didn’t.

After a long and confusing period of time I eventually ended up with a major in journalism with an emphasis in advertising and later added psychology as a second.

I sat in my journalism classes where over and over again I was told about The Advance-Titan, the school paper I had never even read. We were told that as journalism students we weren’t going to be taken seriously if we didn’t have any published work to show for ourselves, which scared me enough to somehow one day find my way into the basement of Reeve Memorial Union during the fall semester of my junior year. A room that I would spend every Wednesday night in until graduation two and a half years later.

I started as a copy editor. Nervously editing stories hoping not to mess up while feeling completely out of my league, but I was too scared to leave. So I stayed. Week after week I came back, and despite always feeling like I was faking it until I made it, I never regretted my time there.

Eventually I made my way to opinion editor, then campus connections editor and now copy chief. Being a part of this paper has made me more connected to this campus and has made me appreciate the time I’ve spent here more than I would have had I not decided to push myself to join. Coming to this school I never would have guessed I would be part of a newspaper, let alone being a part of the staff, and after leaving here I will always be thankful for every Wednesday night spent in Reeve 19.