Whoa. How do we put these four years into words? We started working for the Technician the day we moved into our dorms freshman year — Kaitlin and Emma in Features and Megan in Opinion (then called Viewpoint). We’ve been writers, editors, makeshift designers and photographers. We’ve been called kind and thoughtful, but we’ve also been told that “women shouldn’t be in charge of things like the Technician.”
On the third floor of Witherspoon, from 5 p.m. until midnight four nights per week, we’ve made a newspaper — 124 newspapers, to be exact. Sure, the Technician is a job to put on our resumes, but it’s more than that — it’s a family.
We’ve been fortunate enough to laugh and cry with our staff. We’ve gone out at 1 a.m. to celebrate a job well done with Cook Out milkshakes and french fries, and we’ve also stood our ground together as the campus and surrounding community reacted to the pieces we published. The Technician staff never asks that anyone change their minds. We just ask that people be open to new ideas and different ways of thinking.
Through the unending hate mail, the Technician family has been tough. It’s hard to spend all your free time and sanity on a sometimes thankless job. Most days, after putting in six hours in class, seven hours at the newspaper, five hours of sleep and countless hours of homework, we wake up to emails critiquing our work. The thing is, the people who work at the paper still come back every night to do it all over again. They work here not for the money or the resume-building title, but because they want to make an active difference in their community.
In Wednesday’s paper, we misspelled “lavender” in a headline as “lavendar.” Last week, we misspelled “position” as “positon.” We have repeatedly misspelled “fashion” as “fasion.” We’re not perfect, but we love our jobs.
We have been in a four-year relationship with the Technician, and we’re finally being told, “It’s not you, it’s me.” With 16 days until graduation, a whole new adventure lies ahead of us. We leave the Technician not by choice but by circumstance.
In 323 Witherspoon, we have found safety among our friends and fellow staff members while also doing work that has real consequences. The Technician is a learning experience. Being simultaneously comfortable among our staff members and challenged in our work has humbled us immensely.
This year has been exhausting and stressful, but we wouldn’t have had it any other way. We are so grateful to have had the kindest, most committed and intelligent people working alongside us.
To quote our editor from our freshman year, “College is not about where you go, but rather what you end up doing while you’re there.” We’re glad we ended up with the Technician.
To all Technician staff members past and present, and to the NC State student body, thank you. It has been quite the year.
