COLUMN
The Cougar changed my life Joining an on campus organization not only bettered my skills, but it introduced me to my best friends. Story and photos by McKenzie Misiaszek
I
’ve never been someone with a lot of school spirit, so campus involvement never crossed my mind. It wasn’t until my junior year of undergrad that I knew I had to start building up my journalism portfolio, so I sought out the campus paper, The Daily Cougar. At this point I had very few friends. I had lost touch with everyone from high school because we just weren’t the same people, and long distance exacerbated our differences. My roommates from freshman year and I didn’t have as much in common as previously thought, and it’s just hard to make friends when you’re not in multiple classes with the same people. 4
COOGLIFE // January 2022
When I came in to interview to be a writer for the paper I was nervous. I had only written one journalism story and the office was busy. I looked at all of these other students who looked like they knew what they were doing and I was intimidated. When I was told they’d love to have me and assigned me my first story I was surprised at how easy it was to join. That’s the thing, joining an on campus organization is so easy that the biggest hurdle is finding one to join. My first year there I learned a lot, and while I didn’t come away from that year with a ton of friends that summer an entirely new team of editorial board members came in. Little
did I know that these people were going to be the group that I had been looking for my entire college career. This new team worked really well together. We were all passionate about journalism, photography, politics and on top of it we all had similar senses of humor. We won a scavenger hunt as a team building exercise, went to media events together and made memes of one another. Now, three and a half years later, I still consider them my best friends. Although the last time we saw one another was Halloween, (thanks, Omicron) we have a group chat that’s updated regularly, have been through major life events with one another, like job changes,
