By Brandon Cortés
Features Editor
Goodbyes never feel clean. They are more like slow fades. One day you are rewriting a lead at 11 p.m., and the next, you are leaving a campus you used to sprint across because you were late to an interview.
When I joined the Southern News, I did not really know who I was as a writer. I just knew I liked chasing stories.
Somewhere between the late-night drafts, the deadlines I barely survived and the people who pushed me to sharpen my voice, I realized this place quietly shaped me.
It taught me how to pay attention. How to listen. How to sit with someone’s words long enough to understand what they were trying to say underneath the polished quote.
A huge part of that growth came from the people who took the time to guide me.
Thanks to Solé Scott and Jay’Mi Vazquez for showing me the ropes and helping me through the process of becoming a features editor, from the layout grind to the small details that make a page actually work. Looking back, I owe a lot of this semester to them.
And then there were the copy editors, Hannah Graham and Mackenzie Byerlee, who somehow managed to catch everything — the stray comma, the awkward line break, the thing I swear I looked at a thousand times.
Their consistency made our pages better every single week. Watching how seriously they took their work taught me what real care for the craft looks like.
I also owe a lot to the professors who shaped the way I think and write.
Professor Simoneau, with her tough love, pushed me harder than I wanted to admit I needed at the time.
And Professor Gil — always rooting for me, always reminding me I had something worth saying — gave me the confidence to keep going even when my doubt was louder than the words on the page.
All of this — the people, the deadlines, the chaos — forced me out of whatever version of myself I was hiding behind.
I realized the best stories are not the big, dramatic ones. They are the smaller moments. The quiet confessions in interviews. The awkward laughs. The pauses where someone decides whether to trust you. The walks across campus where you are trying to piece together a lead that still refuses to cooperate.
That has been the theme of my time here: not knowing but moving anyway. Chasing stories even when they scared me. Writing things I was not sure I could pull off. Trusting that each assignment would teach me something, even if it was just how to be a little braver next time.
I am leaving with a degree, sure. But more importantly, I am leaving with a version of myself I would not have met without this newsroom and without the people who believed in me long before I believed in myself.
I am stepping into whatever comes next with the same thing Southern News gave me from day one: curiosity, stubbornness and the sense that there are still stories worth chasing.
This is it. Adiós.
