Gabby DeMarchi
Editor-in-Chief
I am not a fan of change. Never have been, never will be, but the fact that I am in my final semester of my senior year of college pretty much takes the cake when it comes to major, soon-to-be changes.
While I am in complete and utter shock that my college career is almost over, I am honored and blessed to be taking over as Editor-in-Chief of The Springfield Student this spring semester.
This past summer, it was decided that myself, and last fall’s EIC, Terrence Payne, would be splitting the duty this year. After watching and learning from Terrence in the fall, I feel that I’m prepared to take the reins and guide The Student in a new and exciting direction.
These past three and a half years writing for The Student have been very surreal. I entered the Communications/Sports Journalism major here at Springfield College having zero experience in the journalism world. I knew I wanted to report sports, and I was going to do all I had to do to make that a reality for myself.
With that in mind, I went to my first newspaper meeting in September 2009, and I have been here ever since.
It wasn’t always smooth sailing though.
I remember the first article that I was assigned. I was to cover this singer who was performing at the old Dunkin’ Donuts, before the Campus Union existed. I remember sitting throughout the entire concert, taking careful notes about the audience, my surroundings, etc., but when it came to actually interviewing the guy, I completely froze up and bailed without uttering a word to him.
Needless to say, the article wasn’t too good, and the entire experience was humiliating for me personally.
My second mess-up came only weeks later. I had been assigned more stories, but realized none of them were getting published. I didn’t understand. I had gotten over my fear of talking to strangers, I bought a tape recorder, and I was getting great interviews, but my articles weren’t making it in. What was I doing wrong?
It wasn’t until almost a month later that I was notified that I had been sending all my articles to the wrong email address and they never actually received anything that I had been writing. Awesome.
While freshman year was definitely a learning process, I slowly began to learn and grow as a writer.
While I was in the mindset that I wanted to write sports and only sports, I started writing all different types of stories. Stories on concerts, dance shows, magicians, art shows, comedians; the list goes on.
I learned that if I wanted to become a successful writer, I needed to be diverse in what I wrote about. I needed to be flexible and open-minded.
This worked greatly to my benefit. I got to meet and talk to so many new people and learn so many new things. It was a great way to make connections, and that’s exactly what I did.
After slowly but surely working myself up the totem pole, here I am, finally EIC of The Springfield Student.
Seeing as this beast is now mine, I want to do my best to better this publication is every way that I can.
I would love to continue our coverage of diverse campus activities, but make them even bigger and better than ever before. I want to do more in-depth pieces, sports and non-sports, to show off how talented our group of writers truly are. I also want to expand our staff greatly. We have an amazing core group, and I am so lucky to have them, but expanding the staff means expanding the paper into something grander than it is now.
This paper needs a lot of work; I’m not going to deny that, but the major leaps and bounds The Student has made since my freshman year fills me with great pride that I have been part of it all.
As of last year, we now publish all of our articles not only with a hard copy every Thursday, but all of the articles, along with others, are also published on our scstudentmedia.com website.
We have over 2,000 followers on our Facebook page and almost 200 on our Twitter page. We didn’t have a website, Facebook or Twitter page when I started writing freshman year.
We have grown so much, and I hope to only grow more in this final semester.
This paper is for the entirety of the Springfield College community. Every club, event and person deserves to have their story told. We are a paper for everyone and we want all voices to be heard.
With that, we are always looking for story ideas, events to be covered, and people to interview. Please feel free at any time during this semester to email me personally (gdemarchi@springfieldcollege.edu) or at The Student email address (thescstudent1910@gmail.com) with any suggestions, questions, comments or concerns.
So here’s to a new semester for The Springfield Student. I would love nothing more than to go out with a bang, so expect big things from us. It’s going to be a great semester. I can already tell.