By Hannah Lee
It has been a great honor and privilege to serve as a staff writer for The Trail for the past three years. If I could go back and tell my sophomore-year self about how they would be the public health point person on the team, I don’t think they would have believed it.
I hadn’t worked on a news team in any capacity before, and it was definitely a learning experience. Learning how to change my style to not write so academically and how to conduct effective interviews was difficult but I’m glad that I did. Those skills can be applied to so much more than news, and I’ve found myself falling back on those skills as I navigated some tougher college classes.
All of my editors have been amazing. From section editors to copy editors, it never felt like they were fundamentally changing what and how I wrote. Everybody was so open to the topics that I felt like writing and being allowed to carve out that public health niche is something that I will forever be grateful for. Editors have helped me when I was stuck and were always happy to help me look for different sources and listen to my thought processes.
Fellow staff writers have been some incredible friends to me, and I am glad that I was able to collaborate on articles with some. Talking about the progress of our articles also made me feel a little less alone in balancing a job on top of school. They were also an incredible resource for pointing me in different directions for more information and for giving suggestions on how I should approach a story.
It’s also been amazing to learn more about the public health side of things. Learning things about COVID and other various topics intrigued me, and it was an honor to deliver that information in a more digestible way to the campus community. I can only hope that people actually read my articles.
I also hope that public health will continue to be a portion of The Trail. Public health is so incredibly important in this day and age. I would hope that somebody or multiple people will continue what I have started.
It’s been an incredible journey, and a huge thank you to everyone I’ve met and worked with along the way. I’ll miss everyone.