UCLA is a really big school.
But being a part of the Daily Bruin staff made it smaller. UCLA became as small as the stories I taped to my closet door as a freshman news contributor, as compact as the Crimewatch maps I compiled, as friendly as the 40-person senior staff I edited with my second year.
In the past four years, I’ve probably spent more cumulative hours in this small, dirty, windowless, wonderful Kerckhoff furnace than I have anywhere else on campus (including where I live, by the way).
The Bruin gave me some of my most triumphant college moments, crafting my best stories. On multiple occasions, it was also the place where I dealt with my most serious failures.
Either way, this office is where muscle memory assumes I want to go after class – or before it, or during. It provides all the sustenance I need – water, printing paper (shh, that one’s a secret), Band-Aids and a filthy couch to rest on. Even free food once in a while.
The paper is where I found many of my closest friends in college, the ones who listen to me rant about crime for hours, who wander campus with me at 2 a.m. to find ghosts, who debate politics on the way to a tailgate, who sing with me at Brew Co. and understand that you don’t really know a person until you’ve Googled them.
The deadlines – with the help of some amazing English professors – are the reason I can write an A-worthy literary argument about Las Vegas in a few hours.
The first -30- column I read, three years ago, was written by my news editor at the time. It was about Stripes Tuesday, a tradition she created with a friend – every Tuesday she wore stripes, and she had convinced much of the office, including me, to do the same.
If you’re a graduating senior, I hope you found something that made UCLA special for you, too. I hope you found a few families here, and that these have been the four most difficult, stressful and memorable years of your life so far.
And if you’re not graduating, and you don’t relate to this yet, then good luck, and I hope you find and create traditions on this campus that continue for a very long time.
I, for one, will always wear stripes on Tuesday.
Kohli was news senior staff from 2011-2013, assistant news editor from 2010-2011 and a news reporter from 2009-2010.