A little over a week ago, I was standing in the back of the Boar’s Head Dinner taking in the scene, interested to see to whom MERT was about to pass the Boar’s Head.
To my complete surprise, they named the Campus Times, and somewhere during the handshaking, someone told me to go to the podium and say something. But, this proved difficult for me for two reasons: first, I was completely unprepared; second, as it turns out, Daniel Nassau had turned off the microphone. There was a lot I wanted to say right then about the students who work for the CT and I’m not sure, whether for technical reasons or not, I was able to communicate it all.
The students who work for the CT are far and away some of the hardest working and most committed students I have met in my time at UR.
There is no big performance, there is no reception and there is no audience cheering them on. The CT doesn’t have one big culminating point the staff works toward every semester, or every year, but rather, these students work day in and day out to provide the entire UR community with a publication of merit.
At the CT, we work to serve several goals. We strive to advocate for the greater student body and for things we feel contribute to the greater health of the University and the community in which it exists. Sometimes that means working for student awareness or safety; other times that means supporting groups of University staff and faculty members in the things they need to improve their jobs and even lives. What that always means is reporting the news and trends of the University in an accurate and balanced way in order to inform the entire UR community of what is happening around them. We try to place UR in its broadest context – viewing it not only in the way it affects students and those who work here, but also in the way it affects the city of Rochester.
At the end of a production week, though, what the CT is in its most basic form is the cumulative work of hundreds upon hundreds of student hours. These aren’t students who want to pad their rsums, and these aren’t students who solely wish to inundate the University community with their opinions. Instead, these are students who truly love UR, want to be informed and involved with what happens here and want to work for the betterment of their community.
So, in that view, it’s more than OK with us that there is no fanfare surrounding the week-to-week work of the CT. Instead, we watch our stacks of papers around campus shrink, we observe students, faculty and staff alike sitting and reading our work and we overhear conversations about articles that were published on our pages. We may not always be perfect, but this is how we strive to serve a community we love so much that we are willing to commit a large portion of our lives to it. And ultimately, it has been my greatest honor to work with these students.
Jarrett is a member of the class of 2009.
