My feelings on the Daily Bruin are complicated.

I started out as a freshman Copy intern, completely entranced by the interworking of a daily college newspaper, desperately hoping I would one day become an editor.

Fast forward four years, and I’m now a senior staffer and two-time slot editor who has edited more than 600 stories for The Bruin. Freshman year Maggie would be giddy if she could see how involved I ended up being.

Becoming a slot editor my sophomore year opened my eyes to the sheer amount of hard work the Daily Bruin requires. I’d do whatever it took to get a story out on time. Working print shifts that would keep me in the office past 3 a.m., editing breaking news stories in the backseat of cars, taking overnight shifts to edit coverage of the Getty fire – you name it.

The gross, prerenovation Kerckhoff Hall 118 office quickly became my home on campus. The fact that I was willing to spend so much time in a windowless, moldy office – even when I wasn’t on shift – really tells you all you need to know about how fun it was to be an editor. Not even a major water-dispenser-induced office flood could keep me away.

I haven’t even graduated yet, and I’m already nostalgic for our editor retreats, Brie-bite-filled weekly slot meetings, messy PRIME launch parties and trips to De Neve Late Night to celebrate sending the paper to the printer before deadline.

The Daily Bruin gave me a love for UCLA basketball, too many quarantine pool days with Jack Perez to count, a dozen “Bachelor” watch parties, football tailgates and a vested interest in finding out who’s behind the Mark Twain Protege Reddit account (still searching for answers on this!).

But it would be easy for me to put on my rose-colored glasses and make it sound like my entire time in Daily Bruin was amazing. The reality is, the pandemic fundamentally changed my DB experience. Print production – once something I looked forward to – I started to dread. There was no more office, no more wall quotes and no more organic editor friendships.

To be honest, I’ve fallen out of love with the Daily Bruin, mostly thanks to a combination of burnout, student media bureaucracy and overall disillusionment. DB just feels a little less magical than it did before the pandemic.

Despite this, I can still recognize how much the Daily Bruin gave me over the last four years, and for that, I’m grateful. No one signs up for a job that pays $4 an hour unless they absolutely love doing it, and when I look back on my time here, I’ll remember the people who made the hundreds of hours I poured into this paper worth it.

To Sara Hubbard, Zoe Willoughby and Tanmay Shankar – you are truly some of the most intelligent, dedicated and hardworking people I’ve met at UCLA. I would’ve quit DB ages ago if it weren’t for you three.

To everyone in the Dylan channel – you know who you are – thanks for the memes, inside jokes, putting up with my horrible hot takes and making me laugh when I needed it most.

And to everyone else who played a role in my Daily Bruin experience, no matter how small – thank you. I’ve had many friendships come and go during my time here, and I’m grateful for every single one.

It’s easy to get caught up in the small things as a copy editor. Like getting upset that you left “wordswordswords” as filler text in a photo caption that made it to print or that you got a stupid name misspelling correction. And at the time, these things seemed like a huge deal. But at the end of the day, few people notice these things and even fewer care.

It would be easy for me to let the negative parts of my time in DB cloud my overall experience, but if Copy taught me anything, it’s that it’s important to see the forest for the trees.

And the truth is, I’d do it all over again.

Tully was a Copy contributor 2018-2019, slot editor 2019-2021 and Copy senior staff 2021-2022.