An old basement owns half my heart. 

I didn’t expect to feel so many emotions for a newspaper. I was hired by chance freshman year during fall 2018. I was new to town — to the state and even the country if we want to be that dramatic — and desperately looking for a job. The Daily Evergreen emailed me back first, and later that week I began as a news reporter. 

I almost quit that first semester. I was so new, incredibly inexperienced and not even a journalism major. My editors threw me face-first into news and I was falling. In my first month, I covered stories that made me realize what being a queer person of color in journalism would look like, and it terrified me. 

I was scared, but I’ve always had an alarmingly low amount of care for my well-being. I was basically living in fight or flight mode again, but it was like I found a new path between the two options — journalism made me feel alive and it still does. 

I continued reporting news, and it was mostly hard news. I jumped on the crime and the courts beat, covered legislation and any breaking news was automatically mine. I thought I would stay like that, refusing to go beyond black-and-white truth and lies. That was really idiotic of me because journalism is so much more than that — I wanted to do it all. 

My editors pushed me beyond hard news and I began having even more fun. I celebrated Diwali with a local ashram and wrote features about business owners; the latter allowed me to circle back to a story I helped break about employer misconduct. But there were also stories that were very hard to cover, like student deaths, Black Lives Matter demonstrations and then an entire pandemic. 

I credit a lot of my growth in journalism to the editors I had at the Evergreen. I was encouraged to become a page design editor during my second semester and that helped me connect with the editors who ran the newsroom. I am still, and probably always will be, in awe of those editors. 

There were four specific ones that I still obsess over; I am such a big fan of them and I can’t wait to see how they change the field. Two of them are women of color and they helped me forge a way to make journalism mine. They helped me see that I didn’t have to suppress my identity for my career; instead, my viewpoint on life allows me to do journalism even better. 

Their encouragement and my own growth helped me become a pretty decent editor who was able to work with more than just design. I was the news editor for an entire year, then copy chief, research editor and back to news editor again when I was needed last semester. I hope that I was at least one-tenth as good an editor as the ones I had. 

Fall 2021 was my last semester with the Evergreen. In total, I spent 10 semesters, including summers, with the paper. I honestly haven’t been able to process it all, but I know it was a lot and I wouldn’t change any of it. 

The Daily Evergreen gave me the opportunity to learn journalism in a way that cannot be taught in a classroom. Without the Evergreen, I wouldn’t have gotten the amazing internship and employment opportunities I’ve been able to experience. I wouldn’t have been able to cover stories and talk to people I will always remember. 

I want the Evergreen to continue to be independent and student-run for decades after my graduation. I want amazing journalists to spawn from that too-cold and too-hot basement in Murrow Hall. I want students to be able to learn as much as I did — let’s hope they can. 

This student-run paper means so much to me. It changed my life, and I will always love it for that.