Devin Oommen Signing off: A Farewell Note

Staff reporter Devin Oommen gives readers and coworkers a goodbye note.

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Devin Oommen, Staff Writer

  To the readers of The Courier,

 After two years working for this paper, this is my goodbye.

 Over the past two years I’ve had the incredible experience of reporting on stories that are relevant to this community. It has been an invaluable experience, and this is a time I will never forget.

To all of my coworkers over the past two years, thank you. Working for this paper rarely felt like “work” and that is partly because of the incredible people I’ve been able to work alongside. It was nearly impossible to get any work done in the newsroom when there were more than three people in it, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

To the readers, thank you. The feedback that we get makes the work worth it. We read the comments, the letters to the editors and the survey responses.

To James Fuller, our adviser, thank you for teaching us how to do good journalism. We tortured you for a semester with late night pitch meetings, but you put up with it. Thank you for finding ways to encourage us to write about what we are passionate about.

Writing for this paper showed me how much work goes into news media. The photos, the graphics, the page designs, editing and fact-checking along with the interviewing and writing are no small feat. 

To anyone that has ever given The Courier an interview for a story, thank you. Without people who are willing to do those interviews our stories would not have the depth and context that they need.

Writing for the paper is a weekly endeavor. Every single week, the writers trudge into the newsroom or onto the Zoom meeting for a pitch meeting. In the time between the pitch meeting and Monday night, the writers scramble to get the work for their stories done. Some weeks this is easier to do than others.

But, every week we continued on.

To all the people who continued to read, I hope we did the paper justice.

If there are any future Courier employees reading this, I hope you carry the torch well. It’s not always the easiest job, but it is incredibly fun. If I can give you any advice it is this: if a company is using COD’s campus to improve facial recognition technology, never volunteer to do a story about it! Also, don’t eat cold pizza straight out of the fridge. That’s disgusting. Who does that? 

If I’ve taken anything away from my time writing for this paper, it is the importance of good and independent news media. I hope the Courier has been that for my time here.

With that, I’m signing out!