For four years, we’ve been building to this moment. If you know anything about Kayla and me, you’d know that it was a bumpy road to get to where we are right now in terms of love and hate, textbooks and bills, late nights and long talks, everything you can think of. But we are here – the end is in sight for us, for newspaper and for our time at Baker University.

This year has been a year of learning; for the entire second semester, our advisor Dave Bostwick was traveling abroad at Harlaxton, so the entirety of this publication fell on our shoulders. We faced stories about an extremely wide array of topics, stuff we had never experienced let alone learned how to cover for a newspaper.

As editors, we had to learn, right then and there – and let us tell you, we were scared. Honestly, it probably wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have each other there to push the other; on nights when one of us was too tired to do work, the other picked up the slack. Besides being an awesome resumé booster, spending this year as your editors has taught us more than almost any of our times spent in a classroom.

First of all, we learned about being leaders. There’s nothing easy about leading, especially when you’re trying to manage a group of peers. No one takes you seriously, and it can sometimes feel like a joke, but there is virtue in understanding and being patient. We learned that sometimes it’s easier to just bite our tongues and do the work ourselves.

We also learned what it feels like to be completely exhausted. Without ever being a part of a publication, it’s hard to understand what it feels like to put so much pressure on 16 pages. We know this paper isn’t going out to millions of readers, but we still act like it. Why do something if you aren’t going to put your entire heart and soul into it?

Another lesson we learned this year – to do something right you have to give everything you have. Precious hours and even a few tears were spent in Pulliam Hall, where we would sit three Red Bulls deep, reading the same story 20 times, just to see if we could catch a punctuation error. We learned how it feels to keep pushing when it feels like the end.

And granted, it didn’t hurt that we had a few (ha!) awards to cuddle up next to at night. This helped make the whole enchilada worth it. For Kayla and me, it proved that we were good at what we do. But at this point in the year, we are tired and ready to pass this on to the next set of hands that will flip pages incessantly and type more than they ever thought possible, to students who will learn and grow through the process of making this newspaper.

They say the field is dying, and thousands are being laid off every day in newsrooms across the country, but we aren’t nervous. We know what we can do, we’ve seen it firsthand in the gold foil lettering on our awards, and we know that just by putting one foot in front of the other, reading ONE more story before going to sleep, things will get done.

Even though we wanted to give up 100 times and go to the Mine, we never did (well … for the most part), The Baker Orange was our baby, something we probably took way too seriously, but something tangible that showed us the importance of pushing forward and giving it our all. Even after we receive our diplomas in three weeks, this thick, off-white stock will still be our most momentous paper.