I didn’t plan to spend four years at the Texan. It just kind of happened.

Sure, I tried out for copy less than a week after starting classes. But I never expected the Texan to become the centerpiece of my college experience, and I am so incredibly glad that it did.

In hindsight, it’s difficult for me to describe what on earth I found appealing about showing up to the office at 4 p.m. and staying there until 1 a.m. each week. But I’d do it all over again if I could — the Kins runs, the awful puns and even the copyright symbol that somehow ended up in a front-page headline my freshman year. 

The worst decision I made in college was deciding to take a semester off from the paper my sophomore year. As soon as I left, I knew I had to come back. Now, two years later, it’s finally time for me to say goodbye again.

Working at the Texan has been a blast. I wrote headlines, edited podcasts and livestreamed interviews with Beto O’Rourke and DeRay Mckesson. I deleted enough Oxford commas to last a lifetime. And I got to live-tweet Texas’ victory over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

Through it all, the Texan made me a better writer. It helped me land several internships and get into graduate school. It was a welcome distraction from the tedium of writing lab reports. And it gave me the opportunity to share my lame sense of humor with all of our 57,000-plus followers on Twitter. 

But I’m most grateful for all the people I worked with and the countless hours we spent together in the basement. There are very few places on campus where you can debate punctuation one minute and Mitski the next. There are even fewer places on campus where you can do that while getting paid — less than minimum wage, but hey, it’s something!

So here’s to you, managing editors and editors-in-chief, copy cats and kittens, social media staffers, the department formerly known as podcast, the entire digital team and everyone else I’ve ever called a friend here at the Texan. And you, too, Peter. I’ll miss each and every one of you, and I’m excited to see where y’all end up. I mean it.

I’d love to list all of you out individually, but I don’t have the space for seven semesters and one summer’s worth of names, and I’d feel really bad if I left anyone out. Seriously, I’ve been here since Jack was managing editor. Do y’all even know who that is?

Maybe I should do a Twitter thread instead.