No regrets

When I came to college I expected to graduate with good grades and a good job lined up. Here we are on graduation day and my grades are decent, but surely could have been better, and I am jobless. I attribute all of these failures (okay, most of them) to my work at The Tufts Daily. But, you know what? I have no regrets.

In my four years on the Daily I served as a sports reporter, a sports columnist, the managing editor and then finally the editor-in-chief. Perhaps if I didn't take on all those responsibilities I could have been Phi Beta Kappa (yeah, right... who are we kidding?). But you get the point. Maybe if I hadn't been stuck in the Curtis Hall basement for six hours a day every day of my senior year, I would have had time to look for a job (or more time to play video games).

However, I would not trade one second of my experience at the Daily for better grades or more video game time.

My friends on the Daily provided me with a sense of belonging at Tufts University and without them, I honestly don't know if I would be on stage receiving my diploma today (hopefully I'm there; otherwise my parents have wasted 120K and I might not be welcome back in my house... ever).

It all began midway through my freshman year. After a semester of immersing myself in the college environment (partying), I decided that there had to be more to college than dirty frat basements. I was concerned because I felt that many of my high school friends had already established themselves at their colleges and the only thing I had figured out was which frats used cans and which used kegs.

In my mind I had three options - I could either try to solve the problem by joining a sports team, the newspaper, or by transferring. In fact, I seriously toyed with the idea of transferring to UPenn, where four of my high school friends went, but then I remembered the problems that I had filling out a single early decision application to Tufts. (I gave little thought to the fact that UPenn might not have accepted me after my less than stellar first semester). So as you might imagine, I quickly crossed that idea off the list.

I also considered joining the track team, but then I recalled my aversion to practice in high school (we would play basketball instead). So, in actuality, joining Daily was my only realistic option.

Once I made the decision to become a writer I contacted the then-sports editor, Russ Capone, whom I had stayed with during April Open House as a senior in high school. I received a beat (women's swimming) and I was on my way to what, in retrospect, has been a wonderful college experience.

At the beginning of my tenure on the Daily, I would write one or two articles per week and e-mail them down to the sports editors. While this was fun and a lot more useful than those endless games of Madden that we played freshman year in South Hall, something was still missing.

The turning point for me both at the Daily and at the University itself came during the first semester of my sophomore year when Capone told me that the sports department had decided to make Matt Bennett (my housemate for the past two years) and me sports editors.

Capone, McMahon, Neil Taylor, and Jon Japha were the big dogs of the sports department back then. And while I didn't really feel like a part of the paper when I was just e-mailing in stories every week, as soon as I started coming down to the office to train, I immediately discovered the community that I had in high school, which, up until that point, had been missing for me in college.

Japha introduced me to life at the Daily by hazing Bennett and me. We had contests to see who could find the most "Daily Style" errors and then the loser had to slurp down some ridiculously hot salsa. I wasn't sure what picking on the sophomores had to do with editing, but who was I to argue? I was a part of something.

Now being picked on and searching for "Daily style" mistakes may not sound like your idea of fun (don't judge... it was fun), but it was so much more than sitting in our "sports corner" in the Curtis Hall basement and editing. Capone was notorious for his "chill fests" (which I later renamed when I became the head of the department, but which unfortunately isn't appropriate for a family newspaper like this one) where the sports department would get together and party. We would go to sporting events together, work out together (yes, I actually lifted a weight... once), taunt Tufts opponents together (Taylor and I thought it was hilarious when we would make people miss free throws by screaming at sparsely attended basketball games), or simply hang out together.

I began to have so much fun that I recruited others to write for the newspaper so that they could become a part of what I enjoyed so much. I wanted to do for them what Capone, McMahon, Taylor, and Japha had done for me. Three freshman from the hall where I lived sophomore year ended up joining the newspaper. While one of them retired mid-season when he claimed to have work for a class that he wasn't actually taking, the other two stuck with it. Ethan Schwartz became a sports editor as did Ethan Austin, who is now my housemate, and who was recently elected managing editor of the Daily.

Even this year when I wasn't officially in the sports department many of the friends that I had made as a sports writer and then a sports editor kept me sane. From current head sports editor Elliott Wiley reminding me not to get too uptight in my new role, to sports editor Manali Shah (one of my oldest friends, who has also been on the Daily since freshman year) giving me a supportive pat on the back (or kick in the butt), to Japha taking time off from his job as a professional reporter to lead a sports editor training session, to Capone being only a phone call away when I needed advice - my friends from the sports department were there for me.

But I think that the incident which most sums up how I feel about the Daily and epitomizes what it has done for me, came in the middle of my semester as editor-in-chief. I became so stressed out that I concluded that I was not cut out for the job. I was certain that I was going to be the EIC that ran the Daily into the ground (I'm a drama queen).

I whined to McMahon about my concerns and he sent me an e-mail which, in essence, told me to get a grip. "Don't even think about the Daily going down, because that's not going to happen. If things ever get to even a near boiling point, which they won't, you have plenty of people you can draw on to come in and speak to the troops - Benny (Gedan), Russ (Capone), Will (Kinlaw), Neil Taylor, (Jon) Japha, and even Pete Sanborn for God's sakes. Hell, I'd even fly in if I had to. We're all behind you, man, and have the utmost confidence in your abilities. That much I can assure you."

I guess what I am trying to say is that while my grades might not be as good as they could have been, and I might be a little bit behind on the job search as a result of my work for the Daily, the friendships that I have formed down in the Curtis Hall basement have made it all worthwhile.