So, I'm part of my school's newspaper, The Octagon. I'm currently a junior, joined in my sophomore year. Really, my reasons for joining were less than noble.
I passed over it in freshman year, mainly because I was new to the school and knew nothing about this so-called newspaper. But during the year, I would always see my friends going on and on about Octagon stuff, and I was one of the only front-to-back readers of the eight issues they put out every year. So, I joined the Octagon in sophomore year. Because my friends were in it.
And, well, Octagon is a grind. It really forced me out of my comfort zones to interview people, write long stories, and get them in on the dot before the deadline. I mean, I missed deadlines, too, which was an important lesson to learn.
And I picked it up fast, and dare I say it, well. My stories were at least decent compared to my friends, who had been in Octagon for two years at this point. I also went to paste-up.
Paste-up is where the page editors of the Octagon, (mostly juniors and seniors) design the actual pages of the issue over the week. It's a long process. You have to lay out all your elements, paste in the stories, the photos, any graphics you design, and so on. Paste-up lasts the whole week and people usually end up staying at school all the way from dismissal to about 11:00 PM or midnight. It is wild.
I never stayed that late in sophomore year, since I wasn't a page editor. I just went there till about 5 or 6, when the sun set, just doing my homework and chatting and having fun. Paste-up is actually a lot of fun, despite the work. Just you and a less than a dozen other of your friends, designing pages into the night.
That is, if I was a page editor. Three of my friends were, as sophomores, which is a little unusual, but there weren't that many juniors in Octagon.
I also figured out a lot of coding in that paste-up room. You see, the editor-in-chief at the time, Larkin, had asked me (I was a pretty well-known nerd) at some point if I could figure out why an image was being clipped off on a website. I did figure it out, after a pretty long while, just from my very basic knowledge of the Chrome Inspect feature.
After that, she gave me administrator access to the website (scdsoctagon.com) so I could help her fix future bugs. And fix them I did. I knew absolutely nothing about website coding or HTML or CSS, but Google is the greatest repository on knowledge in the world. With many, many, many Google searches and a lot or trial and error, I usually managed to fix bug and make design changes. In effect, I've sort of taught myself those languages.
I also took paste-up time to mess around with SSH. I had discovered that SSH existed at the beginning of sophomore year, and I was just exploring what I could do with it. For those of you uninitiated, SSH allows you to remotely control other computers using Terminal/Command Prompt commands. Combined with my beginner's knowledge of the Mac "say" command that allows you to make your MacBook speak, I had a ton of fun. I felt like a real hacker controlling the Octagon computers and making them speak.
Eventually though, I got better. I figured out more complicated commands, closing programs, shutting down the computer, etc. Anything to mess with my friends. I also wrote a script that enabled SSH access for me on whatever computer it was run on. Ensue confusion, as I Airdrop this strange file to my friends' laptops and they so trustingly open it and give me full access to their computer. I still have a lot of fun with that.
Anyway, now in my junior year, I am both page editor and news editor. As the news editor, I read and make comments on news stories as part of our story draft system. A reporter writes the story, the editors read it and catch errors and make suggestions. I still get to write stories, of course.
I'm a page editor now, so I get to be one of those people staying late into the night designing the page. Only, we're doing it online now. Paste-up week is just everyone getting on a Zoom and working all night. But because we're at our houses, paste-up can and has gone a lot later than midnight. I have stayed up to the blistering 5 a.m. finishing up a page on a violinist. I was so beat the rest of day, I napped at every point I possibly could.
But again, it's a lot of fun. You have the strangest discussions late at night, like our EIC teaching us all the different parts of makeup.
Even with that Octagon grind, the late pasteups, it's fun. Anything can be fun with your friends, and I do genuinely enjoy most parts of writing stories and page editing. (Still am not entirely comfortable in interviews). Hopefully, I'll be an EIC next year, although I doubt it. There are a LOT of other equally qualified juniors who also want to be EIC and only one spot opening up for next year.
But we'll see.
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