Writing your final editorial is a daunting task. I seriously considered writing an editorial about some random topic and never acknowledging the fact that this is the last one.

But, here we are, and I can’t pretend that this isn’t the end —  in barely over a week I’ll stroll across the stage and receive a diploma, ending four years of hard work. Shout out to the rest of the seniors, we really are a great class aren’t we?

But the ending of our college journey makes me think about how we end things, and what it feels like to go through endings. The biggest thing for me has been looking back and having regrets.

I think “no regrets” is just about the dumbest thing. If you have no regrets that means you aren’t thinking critically about what you did, or the legacy you’ll leave.

There’s a fine line between never critically evaluating yourself and beating yourself up over things you can’t change. I’ve put intentional effort into making sure that the regrets I have stem from wanting the future to be as good as I can make it, instead of wishing I could go back and change the past.

I have regrets about the way that I’ve handled interviews, or the way I’ve written articles, or the time I put into different things or the way I treated someone. I think it’s a good thing. Without regrets we’ll never grow as people, as friends, as communicators.

But I have no regrets about the effort I put into The Record, and I hope that the other people who work so hard, without getting paid, don’t either.

I believe strongly that the most sacred thing you can give someone besides love, is labor. When you combine the two things into a labor of love, it’s magical. The harder you work, the luckier you are.

And that’s what we do, every Wednesday. And it’s so cool.

There’s nothing left to say but thank you.

Thank you to The Record for opportunities to do random things that would never have happened otherwise. Thank you for climbing in the clock tower, for exploring basements with campus safety, for visiting the factory where The Record is printed, for articles that completely enveloped my life and gave me an excuse to ignore my classes for a few days.

Thank you for the Google alert that I set up with “Goshen College” as the keyword. It never turned up any stories, but it did let me know everytime someone from a small town made the dean’s list and got their name in their local paper.

Thank you to everyone who lets The Record interview them. It takes so much trust to talk to a newspaper. We literally cannot do it without you.

And thank you to everyone who reads it. Everyone who stops me and pitches an article. Everyone who texts me with corrections. This paper thrives because people care about making it, but almost more importantly, people care about reading it.

I’d love to thank all the individual people who made this paper happen, but I’m sure I’d forget a few and there’s no next week to run a correction.