It started in a crowded room, sequestered in the basement of Memorial Union.
Or maybe it was a sunny New England day next to a tri-fold. Maybe even sooner, at a lunch table 150 miles away and four years ago.
There are hundreds of origins to this story. Before I had time to sort them out, this new, exciting chapter that officially started one evening in 2023 is about to come to an end.
I have always found it difficult to write stories that are close to me. Things I care about seem to hold more weight, like I have to put my all into writing it for some sort of rhetorical justice to be served.
That is making this whole exercise difficult; I so desperately want to find the right words to say, to have some sort of meaningful time capsule for myself and maybe have one more piece to my digital footprint to prove that I indeed exist and have a voice.
But that story is too extensive for the time being. I can’t begin this column in earnest without first acknowledging the semi-aquatic elephant in the room.
I am not a traditional journalist. I am not a soon-to-be graduate of the esteemed Harrington School of Communication and Media (some days, though, the urge to double-major was tempting). I am a scientist, a marine biologist, who caught the story bug from three friends in high school and never looked back.
It started with “The Buccaneer,” the school paper for Red Bank Regional High School in Little Silver, N.J. An institution and the backbone of my early journalism career. There, I got my start chasing stories and editorializing until the cows came home.
I was so different from anything I had done up until that point. Writing and producing a project with my voice written all over it, I knew I had to continue.
I was eager to start at The Cigar and took a chance at the first pitch meeting, which brought me to the Ryan Center that night to see Noel Miller.
I have never once had more comments and edits on a document. It was a wreck of a draft, abridged and editorialized that would make even new-media pundits blush.
Somehow, largely due to the amazing cleanup work of Lauren Drapeau, ’24, the article was “fixed” and published to print. The rest was history.
Over the next couple of semesters, Drapeau and Sully Cummins, ’25, effectively taught me how to be a journalist or, at the very least, how to write for The Cigar. This water enthusiast was way in over his head before I had their guidance, and I can’t thank them and the rest of the cigar staff enough.
Let’s briefly catalog my three years at this paper: nine police beats, two political stories, two Super Bowl predictions, 12 campus event stories, five science articles, three newscast packages, three miscellaneous opinion pieces, several works lost to the archive, and 24 entries
for my original opinion column, “Critters on Campus.”
I still can’t believe that every week for the past academic year, I wrote and published a Critters on Campus article, each one filled with terrible lies that somehow reveal truths about the natural world I love so much. Paige Hojdar, the column’s photographer, deserves a huge shoutout for the amazing pictures she scrambles to get every week.
I don’t think in my life I have ever created something so uniquely me, and I am so grateful to be able to share it and surprised I dared to pitch it in the first place. I could not have been a staff reporter without this column.
I love this discipline: The pursuit of a story, the dissemination of pivotal information, is just beautiful. The passion I see among my peers at The Cigar is inspiring. Often, I would lean back in conversation and see these people “talk shop”; it was truly fascinating.
In my world of science, the vocation I will and have dedicated my life to, I am also chasing a story. I hope to contribute my block to the ornate cathedral of knowledge, standing on the shoulders of giants past.
It’s two truths. The “first draft of history” and the analytical basis for the understanding of natural processes. There is a shared passion for discovery, the pursuit of something meaningful. If you look closely enough, there is a deep spiritual connection between these disciplines.
I could go on forever professing the shared wonders and pitfalls of these two worlds, but this young scientist will never forget his time on this side.
This may be the end of my journalist career, who knows? Maybe I’ll find a way to contribute between experiments; the world knows just how badly we need science communicators. Maybe I will be left on the benches LARPing with a paper in hand and a trenchcoat, reminiscing on the days I wore these shoes.
In truth, I was never an outsider. Even though I wasn’t in class with my fellow writers, they treated me like I was one of their own.
It’s been an honor to contribute to this paper, to chase stories and get a glimpse into this discipline full of passionate gossipers. In my pursuit of the protection and understanding of marine life, I will never forget the importance of journalism and telling stories.
