Eric Estes

The Miscellany News office is a cluster of rooms tucked away up on the third floor of the College Center. Situated far above the hustle of the Center's ground floor, few people know this corner of campus even exists. From the office's oversized windows, one gets a pretty good view through the College Center skylights of the throngs and activity below. It's a holistic view of Vassar, an appropriate view for a newspaper office if there ever was one.

Friends, housemates, and parents often struggle to understand exactly why I chose to spend so much time there. I've averaged probably 25 to 30 hours a week, every week, for years. I joined the paper at the very beginning of my freshman year, and I've been involved in over eighty issues since then. This retrospective, however, is actually the first Miscellany article with my name in the byline.

I've spent all my time on the design side of the paper, and overseeing the entirety of Miscellany design meant my attention was needed from the very start of every issue to the very end of every issue, and everywhere in between. Print layout, web design, ads, graphics, and the Miscellany brand itself. Being so intimately involved for so long has given me a fairly unique opportunity to watch the history of The Miscellany News unfold first hand.

From the first issue of Fall 2007 to the last of Spring 2011, the changes the staff has effected have been dramatic. The paper's physical size changed three times. We switched printing companies. The logo was redesigned drastically. The front cover image changed to a traditional newspaper front page. The Backpage moved to the middle of the paper. The Life section became Features, Staff Writers became Staff Reporters, and the paper got a new website, an online editor, and a social-media editor. The office was repainted, rearranged, and redecorated (twice). And I've watched it all from the same position for four years, a rarity in this organization.

But it's not just the changes to the paper that I've seen. The people who come and go each year are some of the most dedicated I've ever known. Over my four years I've worked for five editors in chief: Lauren Sutherland, Acacia O'Connor, Brian Farkas, Ruby Cramer, and Molly Turpin. Each brought with him or her the drive and dedication to make their Miscellany bigger and better than the last. The first two, along with Sam Rosen-Amy, gave me my start during my freshman year. The remaining three became some of my dearest friends. Whether it's a revolutionary change like replacing the front page format, an evolutionary change like changing the body text typeface, or refinements like removing borders around images, each editor in chief has a singular goal: to make the Miscellany the best it can be.

And that strong leadership at the top has always been supported by a staff that is just as dedicated. It is a pretty diverse group of students, from English majors to Political Science, Economics to Media Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies to Film, Computer Science to Art. Yet all will, for better or for worse, put their studies aside for awhile to write their articles, edit their sections, take their photographs, and stay up until the wee hours of Wednesday morning to get this newspaper to print. Those early mornings, though busy and stressful and tired, have been some of my best experiences at Vassar. As twenty people work from the Tuesday sunset to the Wednesday sunrise in the same room, everyone becomes good friends pretty quickly.

If the Misc office's walls could talk, you'd hear success, failure, hopes, dreams, and regrets. You'd hear crazy ideas involving jackalopes or an editor riding a flaming motorcycle being driven by the Easter bunny. There was the Case of the Disappearing Red Bull and the Case of the Disappearing Page 16. There was food article headline brainstorming, "go-to grass," and bow tie graphics. You'd learn the revels of Beaker, Statler, and Waldorf and the revelations of the cartilaginous skeleton of sharks. "Eric, make it more… spindly." "Eric, make it be good." There'd be an office listening to Obama's victory speech live on election night and an office listening to David Sedaris's CDs on triumphant Wednesday afternoons.

I've spent so much time in this office because I have gotten to do what I love with great people, and we've all had a ton of fun doing it. This newspaper has been an enormous part of the last four years of my life and it's hard to imagine no longer being in this office, perhaps harder that it is to imagine no longer being on this campus.

—Eric Estes is the outgoing design and production editor of The Miscellany News.