While I have always had a passion for writing, journalism had never been my thing. The only time I interacted with news growing up was when my parents put on the ABC Nightly News with Brian Williams. My estrangement to news changed when I came back from my EMU cross cultural in the spring of 2019.
As a Writing Studies major, I had to take the course News and Feature Writing. I was not thrilled by the requirement, but I figured I could knock my first practicum credit out of the way in the same semester by joining The Weather Vane. Plus, Chad Gusler was teaching News and Feature, so it was sure to be entertaining. I remember being surprised by the variety of majors in my class. I had not realized just how many other disciplines required the class. There seemed to be three groups of students: those who loved journalism, those who loved to write, and those who simply had to take the class.
However, The Weather Vane was different. While I am sure there were still those three different types of students in the club, The Weather Vane was unique because everyone had to come together to produce a decent-quality paper. Ultimately, it did not matter how much I disliked journalistic writing when I arrived at the Weather Vane’s planning meeting. All that mattered was that I wanted to help, and I was open to doing that in whatever way I could.
What did EMU students care about? What did I care about? That’s was what I got to write about, and it was a relief. There is a certain level of freedom in focusing on what matters to students. I have had the privilege of writing an article for every section of the paper, sometimes multiple times. During that first semester of my involvement, I started with a reflective piece featured in the review section about my cross cultural experience in China the previous fall; then I took on food review for many weeks to follow. In Feb. of 2019, my poetry was featured on the canvas page. That first semester, I got thrown into being a copy editor without really knowing what A.P. Style looked like. (My main contribution was double-checking that pages continued on the pages on which they said they would continue.) By now, I have written everything from an opinion piece on the importance of flexibility during online classes to the delay in election results to a look at first-year political views.
Ultimately, my class schedule prevented me from participating again until last semester. With copy editing completely online and COVID-19 interrupting the occasional print version, The Weather Vane is different, but the team still has the same goal. Every week, we work together to create a paper that incorporates students’ voices and campus happenings, photographed, written, edited, and formatted into one.
Please consider becoming part of our team. Contact us at wvane@emu.edu or on our website at https://www.theweathervane.org/.