To the Behrend Community:

​

Welcome to a new school year! If you are new to Behrend, welcome to Behrend! If you are returning, welcome back! Regardless of whether you’ve been here for five minutes or 50 years, I hope you will take advantage of the opportunities this place has to offer and use this time to talk to some new people. Take this experience in while you can!

​

This is my second year as Editor-in-Chief of the Behrend Beacon, which is actually very unusual. Most EICs serve for one year before they graduate, but I am lucky enough to have a second go at this. Learning how to be EIC was very hard for me, and this year I am excited to have learned the ropes already and to be able to make some lasting impacts on the paper and the campus as a whole.

​

I love Behrend, but there are always improvements to be made. More students need to become engaged in campus activities beyond the classroom. I agree with many other student leaders when I say that there are generally three classes of students when it comes to activities: those who are involved with everything, those who do maybe one club and sometimes show up, and those who do nothing involved with campus beyond class. Some people work or have other obligations that cause them to not have the time, which is completely understandable. If you are a student who goes back to your dorm and secludes yourself from the world, you need to get involved. Not only will you make friends, but it looks great on a resume to have extra experiences when you go to apply for a job. Our community can thrive, but you need to be involved.

​

On a different note, one of the most important things I can say is pay attention to your mental health. Also pay attention to your physical health, but college is a whole new place and there are many stories of students being too stressed mixed with being homesick mixed with a breakup mixed with x, y, and z, which causes them to spiral into a void. Please if you are feeling hopeless or any other bad feelings, please go talk to someone, whether that be a friend, professor, relative, club president, RA, or one of the counselors in the counseling office. Please seek help. You are important and loved (even when it feels like you aren’t) and you are not a burden. We want you here and we want you to survive and thrive. You are important and you matter.

​

Before I conclude my first “letter” of the new year, I would like to point out that the Behrend Beacon is independent from the school. We do not have to follow the “Penn State Values” set forth by the university and they do not have any discretion over what we do or do not print. Every year we receive complaints from people who do not like what is published or do not like how a story about them is written. If someone is interviewed, everything is fair game unless it is “off the record.” We try our best to maintain a high caliber news outlet, but we are not perfect. If a mistake is made, we are much more likely to hear you out if you reach out in a respectful manner. Correction boxes are a thing. We will own up to our mistakes, but only if a mistake is made. One of the jobs of the free press, whether on a small scale like Behrend or on an international scale like the BBC, is to keep people honest.

​

I hope the Behrend community is proud of the fact that our newspaper is not influenced by the administration and that we are not afraid of uncovering and publishing hard and uncomfortable truths. Students should view the Beacon as a place to voice their opinions (as long as they are well researched) and as a place to read about things that are important to our community.

Overall, good luck this school year. Go forth and do great things! I am excited to see what our community can accomplish this year.