By Michael Walsh
I always felt that the luckiest people were those that knew their passion.
Heading into college I had absolutely no clue what I wanted to do while I grew old. My first two years of schooling had me feeling the same thing. While I turned my undeclared major status into a communication major, it might as well still read undeclared.
When I joined The Recorder in the fall of 2008 I had no idea I would be where I am today, writing this column as the editor-in-chief of a college newspaper and an intern reporter for the Hartford Courant. I knew I liked to write and I thought I could do it well. I joined with the full intention of writing film reviews because the ones I had been reading my first two years at CCSU had been less than acceptable in my sometimes snobbish cinematic mind. I apparently did that, as I was offered the role of assistant entertainment editor and then entertainment editor within the next few semesters.
Film has been a passion of mine ever since I watched George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead at the young age of 17. The zombie classic sent me spiraling into the highs and lows of cinema, leaving me to fall in love with arthouse auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and B-movie giants like Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman. My love for film knows no boundaries, except for maybe Michael Bay.
But even as I joined the editorial board as a full-fledged member of the newspaper I never imagined that I would have the nose for news I do today and that I would find thrill in discussing ethical journalist boundaries of fairness and balance with my colleagues. I had the pipedream of becoming a film critic or arts writer. I soon learned how quickly that was a nearly impossible gig to attain right away and realized my writing would have to be broadened. Over the past few years I found that passion I envied others for having and ever since I switched my major to journalism from the wallowing communication department I planned on making a low-paying career of it.
The experience I’ve gained in my many positions on this newspaper has been invaluable and I thank the university and those around me for providing it to me. While being entertainment editor helped me break out of a shell and improve on my writing, taking the positions of managing editor and editor-in-chief on helped improve my news writing and leadership capabilities tenfold. While I still don’t fully understand how I got here, I encourage the rest of CCSU’s students to find an extracurricular activity or club to help them find themselves. After all, that’s what college is about.
But I am here and most grateful for it. While I’ve learned so much in the many journalism classrooms I’ve entered, I learned double that by applying it on my own with a group of other passionate students in a real and alive world. I get to create a newspaper each and every week with my peers and that’s something I might not ever get to do again. I’ve spent 16 hour Monday production days that have me getting home on Tuesday morning at around 4 a.m. and I wouldn’t change a single thing about it. My friends might think I’m crazy for loving it so much, but that doesn’t stop me from getting excited every week in anticipation of putting out our next issue.
As editor-in-chief, I ultimately have final say in what goes in our newspaper and what doesn’t. Should any part of the newspaper falter, I take the blame, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I read and edit every single story placed in the issue and my weary eyes won’t rest until that’s done. As much creative control as the job entitles me, I prefer to share it with my staff, whose points of view help me avoid disastrously ugly layouts, among other things.
I’ve been lucky to learn from and alongside many talented and smart individuals in this office and have also been lucky enough to teach younger writers a thing or two that I’ve learned from my time at the newspaper. And while The Recorder is most certainly considered a club under the school’s standards, it’s a different one. We create a living, breathing publication each and every week and if we make a mistake, no matter how small it might be, we’re accountable for it on a very real level.
This ‘club’ is a 24/7 product. It never sleeps and the same goes for its hard-working staff members who help me fill 12 pages of CCSU-related content each and every week of the school year.