It is hard to believe that this is my final article for the Etownian and that in a few short weeks I’ll be graduating from Elizabethtown College. It is both exciting and terrifying to leave college and go out into the real world, start my career and begin living on my own. I’m happy that in the final issue that I’ll ever work on that I have the opportunity to reflect on my four years at the Etownian.

I started writing for the Etownian my first semester at Etown in fall of 2018. To be completely honest, it was a sudden impulse when I saw the Etownian table set up at the activities fair to sign up to be a staff writer. But I’m so grateful that first-year me made that decision.

My first year I was a writer for the Features section, covering different club events on campus and profiling different Etown alumni. The summer before my sophomore year, I received an offer from the staff to become the Assistant News Editor and begin writing for News instead. While I enjoyed Features, I found that News was where I really belonged. I stayed in that position for two years, putting in the edits from the copy editors and learning our layout software InDesign.

This year, I moved into the News Editor position, and I was excited for the additional responsibility and involvement. One of the biggest new responsibilities was creating the layout for News for each issue using InDesign during production night. These production nights every Wednesday were often time-consuming and frustrating with InDesign causing unpredictable problems to the layout. However, at the same time, it was wonderful to see how the staff helped each other and worked together in order to produce quality layouts each week (even though we would become more delirious as the night went on).

I’m an engineering major, and I was worried initially that I would somehow be isolated at the Etownian due to not having an English or communications focus. This was definitely not the case, and everyone was excited that I as an engineering major could bring a different perspective. To the reader, if you want to join the Etownian or any other club or organization on campus, go for it! Don’t worry about not “fitting in,” you have something unique to bring to the table and others will recognize that.

Something that was very satisfying to me looking back was how my writing, along with my InDesign skills, improved. I learned how to interview, pull necessary information and how to craft a narrative rather than simply covering a series of events. I hope that I’m combatting the stereotype of engineers being bad writers. I’m also proud of my skills in InDesign since I went from having no idea how to use the software to being able to handle it all on my own (well, as long as InDesign decides to cooperate).

It still feels so surreal that this is my last article for the Etownian. However, during these four years I’ve nurtured my passion for writing, and I hope to continue with it after graduation. I wish my fellow graduating staff members the best of luck with their future endeavors. I look forward to reading future Etownian issues and seeing how the paper continues to evolve.