Letter from the Editor: Welcome to Miami … and The Miami Student!

Readers,

Welcome – or welcome back – to Miami University! Many of us have waited months to be back in Oxford. Whether it’s your class schedule you’re most looking forward to (I adore you), or getting Uptown for a beer tower at Skipper’s, Oxford truly is a sacred place to all Miami students.

And if you’re a first-year student, welcome to the best college town in the world.

If this is your first time setting foot on Miami’s charming campus, I absolutely envy you. As I enter my senior year, I would do anything to go back three years and start the clock over again.

But, since time travel has yet to grace us, I will instead use this letter to share some guidance to first-year students on how to make the most of your time as a RedHawk.

In our Back To School print edition, you will find all the information you need to successfully start your undergraduate tenure here at Miami, with a ranking of all the dining halls in Culture, the best places to get fresh air in GreenHawks and the hottest takes on record from our Opinion section. You will also find a list of fall events from our Campus and Community section that you don’t want to miss. This brings me to my first piece of advice:

Try something new.

I know I just spun off the most cliché advice as my own, but it is so true, especially as you arrive on a new college campus.

Go to Mega Fair; try out a bunch of clubs and quit the ones you hate. Go to events with the person who lives next door to you, and meet people who don’t dress like you or are interested in different things. Plan to study abroad in a country where you don’t even speak the language or know anything about. Take a class that interests you, even if it has no relevance to your major. Try.

Which brings me to my next piece of advice:

Show up.

Show up for class, even when you had too much fun at the bars the night before. Show up to your club meetings, even when it’s 10 degrees outside and across campus. And, most importantly, show up for your friends. College is a time for fresh starts, and no one is stopping you from becoming the best version of yourself. So leave the excuses at home and show up for the things that are important to you.

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You can call this a shameless plug, but I see my last piece of advice as genuine guidance:

Stay informed.

You – no matter how much you stay away from news or turn your head – are living in a world where change is happening on a daily basis, both here in Oxford and around the globe. The best way to get through college, and come out on top, is to keep educating yourself on what is going on around you.

Here at The Miami Student, our award-winning staff is committed to keeping Miami and Oxford residents informed about important changes, including news that is overlooked and, in some cases, buried.

There’s a reason the Society of Professional Journalists have named us the Best College Newspaper not only in Ohio, but the wider region of Michigan, West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania, for two years in a row.

So trust us to keep you informed.

There is a list of all our newsstand locations at the beginning of the Back To School issue, as well as our print schedule. For continuous news updates, our newsletter is a great place to quickly see what the top stories of the week are, which you can register to get in your inbox weekly on our website, at www.miamistudent.net.

Finally, we can’t call ourselves a student newspaper if we don’t listen to our most targeted readership: Miami students. So, please utilize the “Story Idea?” tab on our website to let us know what YOU think we should be covering. And, as always, my email line is open.

Love and Honor,

Olivia Patel

Editor-in-Chief

patelou@miamioh.edu

eic@miamistudent.net

@OliviaPatel555

Olivia Patel is a senior at Miami University and the editor-in-chief of The Miami Student. She took over this role in March, and has since been working to make The Student a better publication. She is always open to feedback, and she would love to hear from the readers of The Student.