Thursday was our last day in The Spectrum office. I walked in to the office around 11 a.m. to find my desk decorated, topped with flowers, chocolate and a letter from next year's News Desk.
To be honest, I was baffled. I yelled at them nearly every day for the past semester, I criticized their work, and I repeatedly told them how annoying they were.
I suppose I'll attempt to shell out some form of advice from this.
Unlike the other goodbye columns, I'm not going to talk about how and why to drink – because to be honest, I'm still not good at it. I wake up with bruises, consistently brown out, and have a dwindling dignity – sorry mom, but you've seen me the morning after.
I also have no advice on living in dorms at UB because I didn't. I'm a transfer student and plus, I think I'm better than the rest of Buffalo because I live in the very cultured Elmwood Village. That is, however, better than rockin' the suburbs.
My advice from my time at UB is simple: personality takes practice.
Coming to UB and working for The Spectrum has given me the opportunity to work with a number of different people, putting myself outside of any "safe zone" and learning that my personality is a little difficult to deal with.
Just ask our Editor in Chief Andrew how many times I've left the office crying and screaming "I quit" over the change of a lead or a small shift of a paragraph.
And today, I walked up to my decorated desk and was speechless. Maybe the three new editors wanted some brownie points with the paper's next Editor in Chief, and God knows they need them. But, I had a little reality check.
As I venture on to graduate school at New York University for journalism, I thank the people at The Spectrum and my little group of friends from Buffalo for inspiring me to be a better writer, and also a better person.
If I hadn't joined the paper, and I wasn't living in a dorm or joining a sorority, college would have been useless. There's only so much time I can spend at home talking to my dog, and there's also no way I would've been able to skip 75 percent of my classes if I didn't make friends.
Besides the fact that I made friends practically living in this cave, voluntarily of course, I also learned three things:
You don't always have to be right.
You don't always have to have control.
And yelling gets you nowhere.
There's one more thing to share with other graduating seniors and underclassmen. My Spanish professor gave us two points on our overall grade so it would equal out to 100. With tears in her eyes, she told us earlier this week that because she gave us two points, we have to each give people two points.
That means the next time someone cuts me off in front of Buffalo Seminary and chucks a beer at my car when I beep, I will give them two points and stop beeping at them. Or, when someone shoves me at a bar, I won't spit on them but rather, walk away and give them two points.
Being a bitch gets you nowhere, unless you're in midst of an interview and you want to get information out of a source. Hence, why I want to be a journalist. Don't forget about the two points.
Email: lauren.nostro@ubspectrum.com
