Proud to walk in these Daily Bruin shoes

For Christmas my first year, my brother Raffi bought customized running shoes for me and my four other siblings. He personalized them to have funny inside jokes embroidered on the sides of each of the shoes. Raffi didn’t know what to have stitched on mine, so my mom suggested he write “Daily” on one shoe and “Bruin” on the other because I had just gotten an internship at the paper.

At first I was sort of embarrassed to wear them around the office ““ I was a first-year intern. Not sure what kind of first impression that would have made on the staff.

I guess I didn’t realize the Daily Bruin would literally consume the next four years of my life.

Sometimes I wake up mumbling obscenities because I have to be in Kerckhoff 118 in 10 minutes for our daily budget meeting. But for every budget meeting I’ve attended in the last four years, there has been a great Daily Bruin memory.

Like when we covered Dance Marathon last year and for the first time were able to host a live feed on our website. Alex Wolf and I took short naps on the News couch in between interviews and filming, but when we heard a song we liked, we ran from Kerckhoff 118 to Ackerman Grand Ballroom to catch the ending on the dance floor. Sometimes we got lazy and danced on the desks and chairs in the office instead.

Or when Edward Truong and I were the first customers of the new Carl’s Jr. in Ackerman Student Union at 6 a.m. after having a slumber party on the News couch.

Don’t be surprised that many of my stories end up with me eventually sleeping on the News couch.

There was the time Maggie Shine and I went to UC Irvine to interview Mark Yudof and spent the rest of the weekend furniture shopping in Orange County. And there were our three visits per day to Kerckhoff Coffee House.

We worked hard this year, whether it was covering the UC Board of Regents protests, the stabbing in a chemistry lab, UCLA’s 105th NCAA title, Spring Sing, or spending countless hours in Editorial Board meetings, striving to tell compelling stories through multiple media. We also added a new department, Radio, whose stories were finalists for the Society of Professional Journalists national awards.

It wasn’t always fun and games ““ angry readers, office drama and reinforcing the conflict of interest policy during Undergraduate Students Association Council elections kept me on my toes. But I learned something from every situation.

My Daily Bruin experience was incredibly rewarding, and even more rewarding was meeting some of the greatest friends of my life.

Needless to say, I’m not embarrassed to wear my Daily Bruin shoes anymore.

Tchekmedyian was the editor in chief for 2009-2010, the director of New Media for 2008-2009 and an assistant Online editor for 2007-2008.