“Perfect Muiris. Reading through it here. Really loving it.” The first piece of feedback I got from an editor in The College View in September 2020 – with that, I was off. Little did I know but that one piece of feedback was the first building block for my passion to report on student social matters.
The piece? A feature article about the online orientation the college had done for first years when we were still in lockdown, now lost to the website crash of 2021. The editor? The amazing Róisín Cullen.
There was something about how Róisín worked on that story that fascinated me. How could my words, which assimilated more with a Leaving Certificate essay when I first gave her the piece, change into this long, interesting story for a newspaper?
I would make notes of the changes each week, read more news, read other articles and eventually, it just clicked. I felt confident enough to try my hand for an editor position in second year, landing myself a role as Deputy News Editor alongside a great team.
We covered a lot that year. DCU opening up again, student nurses getting paid, the beginnings of the student accommodation crisis and so much more.
Under the eyes of Jamie McCarron, a champion student journalist, we put together features about each SU candidate and sent out some of the best pitches I’ve seen from the news section to date.
Second year was also where I began to take up a few more stories of my own. Field reporting, chasing down leads, verifying facts and, while it wasn’t quite meeting sources in underground car parks, there was the odd time where I may have put my nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
This fact, as you could imagine, provided for many-a-punchline in The Slipper with friends, joking they couldn’t say what they wanted to if I were around or couldn’t speak about what went on at an event, in case it gets out.
“Would che ever turn off?” a friend suggested only last week.
And lastly, as Deputy Editor, I had the pleasure of working with a passionate group of people this year. Our SU coverage was phenomenal and widely regarded as some of the best journalism that we did this year.
Getting a chance to set the sails on the newspaper that has taught me so much was an honour. There’s so much I could say and so much I could tell about how much I’ve learnt, but I think my articles are long enough to prove I have a problem with retention. So I’ll sign off my final few words with this;
Six protests, three scandals, two SU elections and a whole lot of words later, my time with The College View has finished. What this paper has been able to give me is astonishing, and I cannot thank every editor, writer, contributor, source and most importantly; you, the reader, enough.
Muiris O’Cearbhaill
Image Credit: Microsoft.com