Celebrating Editors on International Writers’ Day

Pho Vu ’23 Staff Writer

At Amherst, we arduously carve out a path that sets us apart — a major, an on-campus job, clubs, the list goes on. All these distinctions on campus are in part possible thanks to the personal statement in our college application. While it is undoubtedly a product of our hard work and determination, it also reflects the effort of the editors — those who restructured our essay to emphasize our potential.

After we got admitted, we continued to write — reading responses, film scripts, essays, and poems for publications like The Indicator and The Lilac. As we do, editors continue to play a consistent role in guiding us through our uncertainties as we try to express ourselves with words. Personally, I made sense of how precious they are through my time at The Student.

I came to Amherst in February of 2022. Here, alongside the cohort of other students who had just arrived on campus, I spent my time figuring out how to register for classes, making mental notes of my favorite dishes at Val, and exploring the communities I was interested in joining. Given poor weather conditions and a cramped class schedule, the task of searching for a particular place that fit my niche presented a challenge. But as luck would have it, my prayer was finally answered: As March neared, I stumbled upon a post in the Daily Mammoth bulletin from The Amherst Student, which was looking for a news writer.

Having read The Student’s articles, I understood that the actual task required more than what I was capable of. I had never done news reporting before, and I saw The Student as a place where people delved into strenuous work without days off. I got scared and swiped through the post. One week later, I happened to see the post again while browsing my laptop towards the end of my “COSC-111” lecture. This time, my instincts told me to peruse the content. The moment I saw the line “no experience required,” I gathered up the courage and sent an email to one of the news editors at the time. It was this random attempt at trying new things that led to a new land of self-discovery and new friendships.

During my first drop-in meeting with the news team, I handed in an eight-page report of an “Alumni-in-Residence” event with so much excitement. The editors praised the piece, which made me feel very happy, but I was aghast by the number of edits that they left on the Google document. Reading through the editors’ comments, I quickly learned that an article was not just about the information. Unlike essays, it was more about delivering key events and people within a limited amount of words. But the meticulous feedback on that document set off my motivation, and continuing to write for The Student based solely on that factor turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Fall 2022 quickly approached and the weather became much more pleasant. Like a puzzle with all the edge pieces placed, everything started to settle in for me. Thanks to the endearingly encouraging words from the editors’ weekly emails, I was hurled into a world that fostered new ideas for the stories that I wanted to share. For the first time, I entered the newsroom of The Student, where I saw how they produced impressive articles and made revisions to other writers’ work against the ticking clock every Tuesday night. What took me hours to get done took them half the time, and witnessing this flawless clockwork made me want to be a part of the team.

Talking to the editors about my potential writing topics was similar to sharing an academic plan with a counselor, but what was invigorating about it was that I gained access to their life experiences and their inner souls. They were perfect ex- amples that demonstrated the possibility of pure joy in any corner of the world, as long as you have the passion and purpose for something you do.

As I was creating my own voice, I found myself not making any progress. The emphasis on style differed as I jumped between sections (from News to Arts and Living to Features to Opinion), and these people were guiding me from day one. They gave me advice that would later feed into my work. No AI writing service would be able to do that properly. Together, we worked out something that both alluringly invited readership and saved for me a core memory about specific parts of my college journey.

By staying open to new suggestions from my editors, I got to savor the merit of collaborative creation in literary works — something that I took away from the first chapter of Jack Stillinger’s “Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius” in ARHA-155 during the