"My year as a staff writer and relationships with the editors taught me valuable lessons about the field, about Rowan, and about myself." - Features Editor / Paige Britt
After two years and over 60 published articles for The Whit, it’s a wrap.
As a student transferring to Rowan from Rowan College of South Jersey, I didn’t know what to expect. I was excited about the opportunities ahead, and I was terrified about being the new kid and finding my place in a big university. I was a little fish in a big pond, and I could either stay that way forever or engulf myself in this new world.
My very first class at Rowan, Magazine Article Writing with Professor DiUlio, (highly recommend!), confirmed for me that I was in the right place. Beyond that, it showed me how lucky I was to be in the same place at the same time with the people I was surrounded by. (Serendipity in journalism, if you know you know.)
I was quickly and lovingly peer pressured to join The Whit. I started with opinion writing, which provided my timid, unsure voice with an outlet. This, along with the encouragement of last year’s editorial staff, gave me the confidence to branch out to the other sections. Every week I would pick up articles in the news, arts and entertainment, and the nearest and dearest to my heart, features sections. For the record, I wrote for sports once and only once, but now I can say I’ve written for all five sections.
My year as a staff writer and relationships with the editors taught me valuable lessons about the field, about Rowan, and about myself. They saw the potential in me to bloom and treated me with kindness.
From there, I was elected to Features Editor, a position that has been an honor and a privilege to hold. It is permanently a facet of my personality and a defining quality of myself that I feel like encapsulates everything I love about journalism. Coming up with pitches, working with writers one and one, and battling InDesign in Bozorth 108 are genuinely experiences I would not trade for the world.
I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the College Media Conference in New York City two years in a row, which was enlightening, inspiring, and in some ways downright life changing. Getting to experience three days running around Manhattan and pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw with some of my favorite people in the world was both healing and eye opening.
Not only my time at Rowan but my time as a college student has been beautifully intertwined with my time at The Whit. I cannot say goodbye to one without saying goodbye to both. The two experiences exist as one in my mind, if not Glassboro serving as the backdrop to the sitcom that is a college newspaper staff. For me, The Whit takes center stage, always.
This is not to say that I haven’t had the most incredible professors a journalism student could ask for. Their guidance, support, and wisdom has been invaluable during my time at Rowan and I consider myself lucky that I can lean on them after graduation and as I enter the field.
Wednesdays are permanently altered in my brain. Whit Wednesdays, our weekly production night and content meeting, can be a stress-filled, chaotic day soundtracked by either Rowan band Suburban Moon, Glee covers, Wicked, or ambient jazz. The night dissolves into a manic mix of all of the above, usually paired with whatever sports game is most important that night on mute. The glazed over, zombified looks of mostly 20-somethings glued to a Mac desktop, desperately trying to put a paper together, punctuated by random singing and outbursts of laughter is a special kind of magic that I’m not sure can be fully recreated anywhere else.
As much as I have gained about journalism from this experience, it is nearly outshined by one thing: friendship. The relationships and bonds that have come together in The Whit office are once in a lifetime connections. To my fellow editors and staff members: you guys are my best friends and I love you and cherish you deeply. I consider myself lucky to call you my friends and I am endlessly proud of all you have done and all you have yet to do. I cannot wait to read your first big shot bylines and say, “I knew you when.” I knew you when you were cursing out InDesign, crashing out on the way back from the vending machine, and laughing to the point of tears of something that can’t really be explained. I knew you when you were 20 or 21 or 22, and I knew you would always make it.
As the theater kids that most of us secretly or not-so secretly are, I would be remiss if I did not say this: because I knew you, I have been changed for good.
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