Fifth-year keeps passions alive with reporting

  Scott Wong Wong was a 2000-01 staff News
writer for the Daily Bruin and graduated with a degree in English.
Although The Bruin tried to make him graduate and leave, Scott B.
found clever ways to stay and write. E-mail him in Japan at
[email protected].

You’re only a newspaper man. An expatriated newspaper man.
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought
to wake up with your mouth full of pity.” ““ “The
Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway.

Travel. Music. Love. Writing. These were the passions I promised
to pursue the day I started out at UCLA in the fall of 1996.

After discovering Hemingway in a small, modest bookstore in
Northern California, I told myself one day I would run with the
bulls down the cobblestoned streets in Spain.

After eight years of piano lessons and endless car rides spent
singing songs from the “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack with
Mom, I promised to find the place and time to compose and record my
own music.

And when I lost my girlfriend in a car accident my senior year
of high school, I convinced myself of the existence of new
beginnings and new relationships.

Needless to say, I ran in Spain, sang my song, and found true
love during my college career. And writing ““ well, writing
simply came with being an English major.

But last summer, as my final quarter of school approached, I
realized that in four years at the university, I did not feel that
my words reached anyone but myself.Countless papers on Milton,
Dickens, Woolf, Swift, Shelley and Shakespeare did not satisfy my
zest for writing.

I knew if I graduated that moment, my one regret in college
would not be having been too shy to ask that girl out on Bruin Walk
or not studying more than twice a week.

It would be that I had never written for the college newspaper,
the paper I picked up every day and read during class, the paper I
grew up reading here at UCLA.

So I did something inconceivable. I turned in an application to
the Daily Bruin with the hope it might allow a fifth-year with no
journalistic experience, pretty much on his way out the door, to
make his mark on the world.

And for some reason, they liked me. Later, I would find out they
were just short-handed in the News department. But it didn’t
matter to me: I was writing, not just once a week, but every day
and for an audience of thousands.

This year has been amazing.

My editors have given me the freedom and opportunity to cover
everything from Midnight Yell to the USAC circus, from Bush
protests to the campus rapist, from spending a day on a bus with
Chancellor Al in inner-city Los Angeles to university conspiracies,
and from lawsuits to features on backpacking through Europe.

For these experiences, I’m grateful. The opportunity to
work with such a dedicated, professional and selfless team of
students has been my motivation this year.

To my friends in News who will continue to hold down the fort
next year, just know there will be eyes reading your pages from the
other side of the world.

After all, I’m only a newspaper man ““ soon to be an
expatriated newspaper man ““ headed east for Japan. Maybe one
day I will face each morning with irony and pity, but for now
I’m pretty content just being a newspaper man.