Outside the Daily Bruin’s editor in chief office hangs a black board encased within a plastic cover.
During my junior year as an assistant Sports editor, our editor in chief left two words scribbled in aqua blue up on the board:
Be bold.
I walked by that sign multiple times a day on my way into and out of the office that year.
From time to time, I’d read it over.
Once in a while, maybe after a long day’s work, I’d knowingly place my hand on the case as I left the office.
Most times, though, I wouldn’t even notice it.
But the words were always there, somewhere in my mind: Be bold.
That’s what I wanted our Sports section to be.
That’s how I wanted our writers to practice journalism.
And that’s who I wanted to be.
Sometimes those words took another, more-vocal form: Go big.
Either way, the concept was the same.
That year, my fellow Sports editors and I tried things that had never been done before in the section, or at least hadn’t been in a very long time.
We did full-page previews for football games, dubbing them ‘Football Fridays.’
We fought for and printed far more six-column, page-spanning stories than in previous years.
We even printed a one-story section front in a regular issue.
We pushed out four feature series in 11 weeks, more than in the entire section’s previous four-year total.
We sent our writers out to conduct the newly-innovated idea of “15-minute interviews,” where they would casually talk to athletes, putting the onus on our writers to face uncertainty and steer the ship themselves.
The list goes on and on.
Some of the projects we did became the talk of the office.
Some of our ideas we innovated admired.
But not all of the things we did when we stepped out of line worked.
Some of them went pretty awry.
Maybe a series was forced.
Perhaps a once well-thought plan punctured.
Potentially, a writer became disappointed with us along the way.
But whether we were on the right or wrong side of the line was beside the point.
What mattered was the courage to step out of line.
To push the limits.
To say, ‘Let’s go big,’ and to hope it would work but not know, and to be okay with that.
That’s the message I want to leave behind at the Daily Bruin.
And it’s the same message I want to embody going forward.
As a newly turned 22-year-old and soon-to-be college graduate, I have a lot of doubts and uncertainty about this thing called “the rest of my life.”
But one thing I know I have hammered out: Be bold.
Oh, and as for how our tale as Sports editors and a paper ended that year.
The Daily Bruin’s 2013-2014 staff went on to win an Associated Press Pacemaker award for best college newspaper in the country.
Our Sports section went on to win the staff-voted award for ‘Best Section.’
But from that I learned endings sometimes aren’t as important as the way you get there.
Kalra was Sports senior staff in 2014, assistant Sports editor from 2013-2014, a Sports reporter from 2012-2013 and a Sports contributor from 2011-2012.