Never underestimate the power of student journalism

Sometimes working in the journalism industry can feel unrewarding or meaningless, but this week reinforced that our work can create change and progress.

Over the last few months, we have been covering across all sections in the paper the reduction of Federal Work Study hours and the university's ultimate decision to end the program early. We found out at the end of last week that the program will remain until finals week from funding from next year's budget. While this may not be the best solution, I do believe that our coverage did put pressure and responsibility on the university, fighting for our fellow students. It felt very rewarding when we heard the announcement and gave me some energy to push through the rest of the semester.

For this week, I covered the Federal Work Study update, the news briefs, the Globe's Point, and wrote an opinion's piece related to the swatting threats that high schools near campus received and all throughout the state. I also did the layout for the news section and tried a little bit of a different layout for the front page for some variety and something different.

We also heard this week that the paper is officially nominated for at least one Mark of Excellence award in our region, and the editor-in-chief and I are trying to find an advisor to attend the conference and awards ceremony with us. The honor is huge and attending the event would be amazing. The rest of my week was spent coordinating this trip, which is not something that my position would entail, and preparing some content for next week's issue. It is hard to believe that there are only two issues left of the semester.