Hey, fun fact! If you’re reading this in print, both articles on this page are written by me. The editorial doesn’t have my name on it, though, because it represents so much more than me; it’s the voice of our entire staff. When I write those, I say “we” instead of “I.”

Up here, I’m about to say “I” a lot.

I realize that as a senior on The Fordham Ram’s staff, this article is meant to be my goodbye after working on this newspaper. It’s wild realizing that my time with the Ram is coming to an end. Course registration is next week, and I’m planning on taking a 6 p.m. class that meets every Tuesday. It feels blasphemous, because during my entire time at Fordham, my Tuesday nights have been Ram nights.

I joined the Ram at the beginning of my freshman year as a copy editor. Editing took up two hours of my week every Tuesday night. I will admit that, sometimes, they were the best two hours of my week. 

During my sophomore year, I started staying later on Tuesdays. Those two hours stretched into four. Then I became copy chief, and those four hours turned into a whole lot more. I sat and worked in our office on Monday evenings and Tuesday nights, usually into the early hours of Wednesday morning. We never made it out before midnight; our record finishing time for copy editing was 12:02 a.m. 

My schedule is a little more lax now. I write the editorial on Tuesday afternoon and swagger in with pizza in the evening. And I still stay late copy editing, even though I don’t have to, because sometimes these hours are the best hours of my week.

The Ram’s office is a little refuge from the outside world. If you’ve never been down here, I don’t know if words can adequately describe it. There are posters of old issues of the Ram up on our wall. Our bulletin boards are papered with memorabilia from past volumes. Some I was here to witness, like the 8.5 x 11 “baby paper” sports page, and some I was not, like the proclamation “Tom Petty is DEAD!” scrawled in bright orange highlighter before Tom Petty died. There’s a wide variety of office chairs sprinkled around the copy table. The drawers have fun surprises in them, like a cache of print photos or an ancient bag of Dum Dums.

But the décor isn’t what makes McGinley B-52 a special place. It’s the people.

When you spend hours in a small office every Tuesday night working on something much bigger than yourself, you bond with one another. The energy in the Ram office is a little magical that way. You also go a little nuts, especially once the clock ticks past 1 a.m. The result is a group of crazy, wonderful, dedicated people. We have inside jokes, fantastic outfits and excellent taste in memes. I’ve grown so much closer to everyone on the Ram this year, and I have a lot of people to thank.

To my fearless leaders: Thank you, Rachel, for pushing through an absolute mountain of red tape to get us here. I missed our Ram office so much when we published exclusively online. And thank you, Dylan, for crafting playlists of nonstop bops and cracking jokes during budget meetings. I regret that I missed out on the Festival of the Elements.

I want to thank every person who’s sat at the head of the copy table since I started with the Ram years ago: Lindsay, Collette, Vanessa, Maggie, Emma, Megan and Ginny. You are my copy queens. (To my current copy queens, I really hope you caught the Oxford comma I left in that sentence. It’s a little Easter egg for you.)

Thank you to every section editor who I’ve wandered over to this fall. It’s been lovely getting to know you all, even if our interactions mostly consist of “How the hell can you have two tenths of an inning?” and “I’m sorry I keep ruining your day, but this word can’t be hyphenated” and “Your best three articles of the week, please?” Thank you for putting up with me, helping me be better and providing me with an unexpected little home tucked away in McGinley basement. 

Thank you for being the best hours of my week.