Editor's Note

Normalcy feels nostalgic

After a year of what feels like yesterday, the status quo makes it harder for us to go back to our pre-pandemic college life. For over a year of pressing red “end call” buttons, somehow our 3-hour synchronous lesson feels longer and draining than our usual 8-hour school days. Even though distance learning makes it easier for us to go to class, we would still want to endure the morning traffic to get to La Purisima over online screens, but only if we could. We’ve conquered a year without hearing the life story of our professors, the wheel of names instead of index cards during recitations, and the never-ending deadlines before 11:59 PM. The candid moments inside our century-old classrooms, our shared silences during exams, and even the lunch (as well as the parts of ourselves) we’ve shared with our classmates whom we might never see next semester are now just moments of normalcy we feel nostalgic for. As students, none of us moved on easily because we never prepared ourselves to even say goodbye. Our shared feelings of longing also mean hoping for a post-COVID world where we no longer have to be six feet away from each other. For now, we are left with dealing online education issues and making these circumstances work for us. From Newsroom to Zoom rooms, The BEACON Publications have successfully navigated its way beyond the gates of the university. For over seven decades of being the voice and the light of the student body, this issue brings you what The BEACON stands for—to make the academe heedful of its grievances. As we reflect on the stumbling blocks of School Year 2020, the publication wishes you to find the light moving forward. On behalf of the Editorial Board 2020-2021, we thank the Ateneo community for believing in the power of campus press freedom during this time of great peril. In hindsight, the legacy of excellence in journalism continues.

SHARMAINE G. CANAMA

Editor-in-Chief, The BEACON Publications