By Harrison Leone
Editor-in-Chief
From the first day of orientation through all of freshman year, the repeated mantra is “get involved”. Get involved, get involved, get involved. You have to leave your room.
Whatever.
I wasn’t hearing any of that. I wanted to stay in my room, emerge once in a while for a plate of Hickey fries and drink on the weekends. I would go to class, I would do my work, but I never saw myself as an active participant in a club or an organization.
Then I found the BV. My first attempt to write for them didn’t take – I either never heard back from or willfully ignored requests to write for the opinion section at the time-but by my sophomore year I was given the golf beat for the sports section.
From then on, I was addicted. I mainlined the BV. I wrote as much as I could as often as I could (looking back, I wished I had written more). I relished editing every story, and found the perfect place for my atypical sleeping schedule. I was thrilled for someone other than my parents and my professors to read what I was writing, even if in reality, it was probably no more than ten people at a time.
Of course, the circulation was never the point. It was the weekly chance to practice your writing, to develop your skills, and to spend time with like-minded and generally amazing people. People like Professors McNall and Vecchio, who care about this paper as much as anyone. People like the editors who came before me, Alexandra Salerno, Kevin Rogers, Sam Berkhead and Heather Monahan, who I was fortunate enough to learn from. People like my fellow graduating BVers, Emma Zaremba, Pat Tintle, Nate West and Taylor Nigrelli, whose friendship has been the greatest part of this whole thing, and whose presence in my life has been an incredible source of strength.
A typical BV scene: It is two o’clock in the morning. The newsroom is under populated, staffed now by only a few tired-eyed section editors and maybe a wayward desker who, for some reason, hasn’t left yet. Every inch of open desk is covered with 14×11 pages marked in red pen. Sweat, printer ink and stale coffee choke the air. This scene is as common as any at The BV, and it is a scene like this, and the people in this scene, that I will miss more than I can say.
Soon Pat, Taylor, Nate, Emma and I will be just another senior class, existing only in wrinkled archives and in the memory of those below us-maybe even mentioned in a story once in a while. But soon, they will move on, too; all that will be left is what we took away from our time here, and that is more than enough for me.
You come to the end of something, and you’ll never say all you wanted to say or how you exactly wanted to say it. I want the people I worked with during my BV tenure-the professors, the editors who were gracious and patient enough to teach me, the staff I’ve had the pleasure to work with this semester, and most importantly the friends I’ve made here – to understand how grateful I am to have known them.
Harrison Leone is the Editor-in-Chief at
The Bona Venture.
His email is
leonehj11@bonaventure.edu
