Editors' Note

The idyllic spring weather that floods campus in the final weeks of school is always a sign of some new beginning, be it the start of college for the hordes of pre-frosh wandering campus, the beginning of an internship or a summer project, or the initiation to the “real world” for those of us seniors who are finally being forced out of the security of being “college students.”

Here at Towerview, spring has another meaning. It marks the last time we will drop photos and edit articles, the last time we send out desperate emails in search of content, the last time we submit our pages—late—to the press, the last time we can define ourselves as college journalists. It marks the end of a volume, the moment when we must come to terms with the fact that we can no longer realize our own “dreams” for this position. But it also signifies the celebration of the volume that we crafted, all 224 pages of it.

We entered this office four years ago in awe of the seemingly mature and professional upperclassmen that ran The Chronicle, cherishing those first DSG meetings and research study stories, the first front pages, our first interviews with administrators and researchers. And we leave largely disillusioned, more preoccupied with the articles left half-complete, the angles left unexplored, the interviews that should have been and the Oxford commas that shouldn’t have. We see ourselves not as the mature leaders we once envisioned, but as typical naïve 20-somethings trying to absorb the most out of college while we still can. We may lose that ambition every once in a while—perhaps best manifested by those issues hastily put together to make our deadline (hint: this issue’s one of them)—but at least we can’t say we didn’t try. Ultimately, it’s that mix of failure and persistent ambition that defines us as student journalists.

In a sense, one could say that this issue focuses on those very two topics. In these pages, Nicole Kyle chronicles how the ambition of a group of law students seeks to exonerate wrongly-convicted individuals—the failures of our justice system, if you will. Julian Spector documents Fuqua students taking on the tasks traditionally reserved for the U.S. Army Special Forces—a pretty ambitious feat, to say the least. And Caitlin Moyles’s interview with Karla Holloway touches on the issue of grappling with setbacks, especially Holloway’s comments on the complexity of life itself. Holloway hopes that students emerge from her Bioethics and Literature course knowing not to fool themselves into thinking that there is only one answer to issues of medicine—which is really a mantra for life itself.

Readers will also find images of the arrival of spring in the back of this issue—snapshots of March Madness, parades downtown and afternoons on the plaza—which serve as yet another reminder that something new is near. As we sign off, we hope that our successors, Ashley Mooney and Caitlin Moyles, find this magazine—this experiment—to be as just as ambitious and challenging as we have. Isn’t that what college is all about?