Greetings Saints, and welcome to the beginning of the end of the semester.

I’m writing for a few unrelated reasons. The first is to wish all of you, and more so to my senior classmates, good luck on finals. It’s almost the end of the road, and for some of us, that finality seems a bit more concrete than usual.

In light of finals week creeping up, I would also like to extend my gratitude to everyone who graced the pages of The Hill News with their writing. It takes a village, and while that’s usually applied to raising kids, this newspaper can be just as demanding. Thank you all for being a part of something that a lot of heart and soul goes into, whether you realize it or not.

In the beginning of the semester, I wrote an article saying that I wanted people to write for us. If you felt strongly about anything and everything, then we would do our best to give you a slate and a platform.

This semester was wild; we’ve done some great work, and we’ve also made some mistakes. We’re students as well. To err is human, after all, and college students, as much as we think otherwise at times, are not exempt from mistakes.

To everyone who read the article and wrote, thank you from the bottom of my heart. It’s not easy to put yourself out there at all, whether writing comes naturally or not, and knowing that you’ve been an integral part of something that impacts hundreds of people, even in some small way, is important.

There are only 10 issues left this year after this gets published. The seniors, including myself, that work on this newspaper, are more than aware that we don’t have much time left.

So, I want to renew the call that I made in the beginning of the semester, and I want to strive for the same kind of relationship that the newspaper has with the Laurentian community.

Promise me – promise us – that if there is something that burns in you or rises up in you, then you open your laptop, pick up your pen, do something that gets your thoughts churning and write for the newspaper.

There is nothing more important than active engagement, and like I said earlier in the semester, when a large group of people write, the paper thrives.

Good luck going forward, Saints. We’ll see you on the other side, whether on campus, abroad or anywhere in between.