About a month ago, I remember waking up exhausted. As my bare feet hit the chilly floor I started toward the bathroom and mumbled with frustration.

Everyone has those days where they just want to stay home, but with the eventuality of my last days at NKU setting in, I have to look back on days like that and smile.

I took a walk around campus this afternoon and started to think about the students and faculty that brought me to each building, if only for one quick interview or a class many years ago. I headed back to my car with a sense of community and accomplishment that I would not have imagined possible when I started here.

Since getting involved with The Northerner and NKU, I’ve worked on numerous stories that I am proud of. Some took months to complete while I still had to maintain other stories, classes and a job. During my time, I met too many people to count, both on and off campus, which I will always remember. I learned so much about how to improve my own writing from spending hours editing other’s work each week.

It is impossible to fully list and describe how different my college experience would have been had I not gotten involved and met everyone on the staff. They certainly made my moody days a little better. I hope they learned as much from me as I did from them.

I need to sincerely thank Michele Day and the rest of The Northerner’s staff for taking me in as part of the family and helping me grow as a writer. I was always drawn to writing because I could be a storyteller and express complex thoughts in an interesting way. On many stories, I feel I succeeded and got to do just that. I look forward to continuing this in the future.

The lessons I learned during my time here have left me sure footed for the next big step.

I’m definitely ready and excited to start writing consistently outside of the safety net of The Northerner, but there will always be a part of me that wishes I could go back.