The first article I wrote for the Maroon-News was an “In the Light” column, assigned to me during one of my first days at Colgate during Pre-Orienta-tion my freshman year. I was still trying to figure out how exactly to navigate the quads and hills of campus and how not to perpetually lock myself out of my dorm room, and had truthfully only signed up for the Maroon-News Pre-Orientation program so that I could get on campus early. I had dabbled in journalism during high school, but considered myself much more of a creative writer than a journalist. The intricacies of newspaper writing and produc-tion were utterly foreign to me. Yet there I was, my first day on the job and on campus and I was suddenly expected to call up a senior and interview him. I panicked, fretted. The prospect proved so daunting to me that I eventually ended up having someone else call to set up the meeting, and then had that same girl come with me to the interview (to be fair, she was the photographer assigned to the article, but my pathetic intimidation nonetheless ruled the day). My first article experience was pretty much the epitome of terrified freshman. I was rather certain I wouldn’t be writing for the Maroon-News again.

Four years later, I am one of those intimidating seniors, and Editor-in-Chief of the paper to boot. Ask me how it happened, and I honestly couldn’t tell you. The clarity with which I recall this first newspaper memory makes the fact that it occurred four years ago seem completely ludicrous. Here comes the clich?e, but time really does fly. It seems unreal that this time next month, I will have graduated from college. In fact, it seems so unreal that I don’t think it has really sunk in yet. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m still furiously finishing papers in the last days of my academic career (thank you very much for that, Colgate), or perhaps it’s because dwelling on such things has never really been my thing, but I haven’t yet had my moments of wistful nostalgia. This reflection is probably the closest I’ve come. Call it denial or delusion or anything in between, but the fact that I won’t be arriving back on campus in the fall, won’t ever spend another Wednesday night in the Maroon-News office until the wee hours of the morning, hasn’t really hit me yet.

Colgate has taught me a lot that I certainly can acknowledge. The Maroon-News has affected me similarly, even if at times I only wanted to tear my hair out in frustration and stop publication. The people I’ve met here and the experiences I’ve had would take far longer to explain and extol than I have space or time to dedicate to it here. I’m not quite sure when all of this will hit me, whether it will be after I finish my last final, while I’m on the beach at Hilton Head, walking across the stage at graduation or maybe several weeks from now, when I’m home and have had time to process all of this, but in any case, I’m going to try to enjoy the here-and-now and not dwell on what the coming weeks might bring.

Contact Brittani DiMare at [email protected].