Special Edition Spring 2022: Editor's Letter
Mandy Hay, Editor-in-Chief
Lauren Trowbridge, Associate Editor
With another semester (and academic year) in the books, we at The Wheel are thrilled to release yet another print edition! After our dive into the history of St. Kate’s, we wanted to widen the lens and look at not just what is relevant to our St. Catherine University community, but what is important in the surrounding communities, from Highland Park and beyond. This was the inspiration for the Spring 2022 Special Edition, Our Community, Our World.
This year, we at The Wheel celebrate community by growing our readership and our staff; we have tackled new avenues of stories and made connections to other communities around campus. Starting now, we are looking to build our team with new writers and a business intern, a new position suggested by one of our higher-ups, as well as move to stipend pay for our editions.
If you look closely, you’ll see two authors that you may not know. In this print edition, we’re excited to announce that we have featured two submissions from St. Kate’s students. We’re over the moon at the opportunity to publish student voices in addition to our amazing staff.
Speaking of our staff: all of our editorial staff, multimedia journalists and editorial interns have gone through a lot of changes in the past year, not only within student news and media, but in our community. As passionate students at a liberal arts college, the ideas of thinking critically, asking questions and learning to lead and influence have been ingrained in us. The more we examine issues from different angles, the more questions we have about who is in power and if they indeed have our best interests in mind.
From the war in Ukraine and what really happens during the recycling process, to questions about our beloved humanities department and examinations of our campus’s accessibility, our team at The Wheel dives deep into issues that we care about.
As we began the brainstorming phases for this edition, several themes emerged; Accessibility, Academia, Social Justice, and Sustainability. These four central ideas are not only themes that we as a staff are passionate about, but we think that these are indicative of what our community is talking about today.
We hope that this edition serves not only as a mark of our enthusiasm and interests, but also raises questions and helps our own St. Kate’s community to realize the questions that students really want answered. As students at a university promising to teach women to lead and influence, it is our duty and right to applaud, critique and question things that we find worthy. Please enjoy this print edition.
On a side note, as Mandy’s graduation day is looming, we’re going to be saying goodbye to our lovely Editor-in-Chief in just a few weeks. We can’t thank her enough for all of her hard work, and we at The Wheel thought it was only right that she say her farewell in our final print edition of the 2021-2022 school year.
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Wow, what a year. Mandy here, of Ask Mandy, of Honor Your Health: Body, Mind, and Spirit, and of course, of The Wheel, signing off as Editor-in-Chief.
As I graduate and pass this role onto Lauren Trowbridge, the Wheel’s extremely capable Associate Editor, I am comforted by the fact that this publication will be left in good hands by a staff that cares about their community and that cares about their world enough to make it better.
With this consolation in mind, I want to reflect back on my last four years on staff. My journey as a journalist started in my Writing for Writers class where I was required to write a newspaper article for an assignment. I chose to write a column about how being a college student is tough but there are ways to make surviving these years easier.
From there, I fell in love with journalistic writing; there is something about being given creative agency to write about real issues, events, and people, that has sung to me since that fateful day in 2019. Since I joined The Wheel as a multimedia journalist, I’ve expanded my writing to include news (a lot of which focused on the pandemic, unfortunately), college sports, event coverage, satire, and more.
I became the featured columnist in 2020, and my Ask Mandy column has received multiple questions that I’ve answered to the best of my ability with the resources and expert testimony that I had at the time. I’m excited to announce that I will be passing this role on to Leah Keith and she will be saving the student body one submission response at a time in her column xoxo Leah.
The editor-in-chief position, in turn, has given me the opportunity to grow as a leader. Though it’s been a stressful job, I have loved this experience. Of course, I could not have made it through without our amazing staff advisor, Andy Steiner, a real-life working journalist, or our growing staff. Mostly, I have enjoyed working with my brilliant colleague Lauren and I cannot wait to see how she continues to grow The Wheel when I am on my merry way.
To our readers, to our amazing writers, and to our super-duper editorial staff, past, present, and future, I say thank you and goodbye. It’s been a great four years.
Mandy out.
