I feel most like myself when I’m walking across campus at 2:00 a.m. on a Monday, when Gasson’s bells stop chiming, the buses stop huffing and puffing their way around campus, and the Quad’s sprinklers soak the bottoms of my jeans if I don’t maneuver around them swiftly enough.
For the past six semesters, I’ve spent my Sundays tucked away in Mac 113, The Heights’ newsroom. As we produce our weekly edition, editing dozens of stories and laboring over headlines, ledes, and page layouts, the hours quickly pass us by. Sunday turns into Monday, and we make our way home once our work is done—sometimes at 11:00 p.m., other times at 3:00 a.m.
My version of a “Sunday reset” is my walk home from the newsroom. Before we jump into a fresh week of headlines, I weave my way through campus, taking note of how bunnies take over the pathway between O’Neill and St. Mary’s when nobody is around to bother them, and how the off-campus traffic lights flash red in the early morning hours.
We college students are constantly told that we are living in unprecedented times. Phrases like “deadly pandemic,” “political insurrection,” and “assassination attempt” were ones I once only thought I’d find within my history textbooks. Now, they’re commonplace.
In the midst of this chaos, I sometimes wish I could drop everything and go visit Walden Pond or the Gardner Museum, hoping the significance of a wonder of nature or work of art could—at least temporarily—drown out the noise. When the news cycle gets overwhelming, I also find myself craving a 2:00 a.m. walk home from The Heights office, eager to be immersed in a silent campus.
But, regardless of my internal disarray, when I wake up Monday morning, there’s a week of happenings that’ll need to be reported on. And at The Heights, we take on that task.
I didn’t have any true experience with journalism until I joined The Heights as a freshman. I was drawn to the paper because of my love for history. As all of my journalism professors have told me, journalism is the first draft of history. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. The Heights has consistently documented Boston College’s history since 1919, and I wanted to play a part in that documentation.
I spent my first two Heights years as a magazine editor, interviewing students, professors, and alumni on all sorts of topics, including patterns of racism, the legacy of the Boston Marathon bombing, and BC’s policies on sex.
I realized that journalism, at its core, isn’t very complicated. It’s all about talking to people with a curious intention. As I got to know the people who have inhabited this campus through my reporting, my fervor for journalism grew.
And then I was given the privilege of serving as The Heights’ 2024 editor-in-chief. Sometimes, amid the headaches that come with managing an independent, nonprofit newsroom, I lost hold of what drew me to The Heights in the first place: leaning into my curiosity, and, most importantly, documenting BC’s history.
Throughout the past year, many Heights articles have detailed campus happenings that wouldn’t have otherwise been reported on—protests, sports games, and student initiatives that are solely memorialized by a Heights article.
You may disagree with how we’ve covered things. You may disagree with the stances our editorial board has taken. But we should all agree on one thing: students’ lives and the events that shape them should be reported on.
Some students will spend four years at BC without ever reading a Heights article. There are others, I hope, who’ve relied on them for important information, turning to them to explain why they saw smoke billowing across Comm. Ave or why students aren’t allowed to distribute condoms on campus.
Either way, we’ve built an archive that BC students in 30 years can turn to when they want to know how former students reacted to the war in Gaza, Trump’s re-election, or nearly any event that will, one day, be considered historic. And that’s something worth working toward—even if it means exchanging a peaceful Sunday reset for a brief 2:00 a.m. walk across campus.
