First off, I’d like to personally apologize to Nina Silber, John Silber, Guru Pradhan, Sargent College and anyone else who we offended or published incorrect information about this semester. I just hope you all know that it was nothing personal. We did our best, and in a few cases, we came up short. We were right only about 99 percent of the time, and I’m sorry if we lost your trust as a result.

All of our little debacles – which happen at every newspaper, every semester – just go to prove how much responsibility goes with buying ink by the barrel. It’s a little too much, if you ask me. We’re just college kids – not that it’s an excuse. But none of us were actually ready for what we got thrown into this semester.

But is anyone when they come to college? I’ve met hundreds – thousands? – of people since I got to campus almost three and a half years ago. Only one has handled everything that’s been thrown at him perfectly. Actually, that’s not even true – my friend Steven seems to have taken care of everything except the Bonsai tree I gave him for his birthday last summer. May it rest in peace.

Not that the rest of us are screwed. This is college – it’s not the big leagues. Most of us, myself included, don’t even know ourselves yet, nevermind everything there is to know about our major, our campus and the world. Some of us pretend we know it all. But this newspaper, at least under my control, never would.

Sometimes we forget that these four years are really supposed to be about learning, whether that learning involves what some professor is babbling about in front of your brutal 8 a.m. lecture, or whether it’s how to deal with covering sensitive stories – like when a student dies.

The key, in my opinion at least, is improvement. If you got better at multivariate calculus – or being a friend – then you’ve succeeded. If you’re leaving college more ready to be a quality, self-respecting human being than you were when you moved in, then power to you.

This newspaper is far from perfect – I’ll be the first to admit that – but, if you’ll allow a moment for my ego to poke out, I think I’m leaving it a little bit better than I found it. I mean, a conservative paper ran a lead story this semester about how they plan to compete with us, and an ultra-liberal one ran a photo of their editors burning our paper. If they hate us from both sides, doesn’t that mean we’re doing a good job?

Though it is all one big learning process, it’s not as if we had it so bad along the way. I probably won’t live somewhere as nice as the Student Village for a good 30 years. I won’t get to do things at any newspaper that I got to do for the Free Press until I’m at least 40. And if I have a beat as good as covering a team like BU hockey and a coach like Jack Parker in the next 15 years, I’ll be thrilled.

But I think what I’ve learned the most this semester is that the way we’re able to succeed is far less the product of our own abilities and ambitions, but much more the people we have supporting us. Personally, I can say that I would not have made it through a week of this semester without my girlfriend, my managing editor and the best editorial board this paper has ever seen (I’m not just saying that).

Anyway, here’s a story to justify all this sappiness. Each semester, after training the people who are going to be doing our jobs next semester, we let them do it on their own for one nerve-racking Thursday night. We also have a few-year-old tradition that those of us who have the night off try to fabricate some piece of breaking news so as to throw the already-upside-down newsroom into a bit more turmoil. As you can imagine, it gets harder and harder to make them believe it each semester.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, thanks to an imaginative new twist, we got them. We convinced everyone there that a few of us had been out doing what people with one night off might do, and that it had gone a little too far. We had supposedly ended up at the Allston-Brighton Police Department, and those of us who weren’t incarcerated we needed a ride back.

The key to the joke was having someone from the newsroom actually pick us up there. So one of our editors from this semester – we’ll call him Frank – gave a call to one of his good friends in the newsroom, who happened to have a car. He got into character, pretended things were really not going well, and his friend immediately got in the car to come to our rescue.

When she got there, we all got a good laugh. She didn’t. And it wasn’t because she was a poor sport – Frank, at our urging, had falsely used her unconditional trust in him just to play a good joke.

We were all too thrilled about getting them to fall for our prank that we didn’t even consider it at the time, but she was right. She soon enough forgave Frank, and he’s an unbelievable kid who will no doubt come through for her every time for the rest of her life. But that’s the point – there’s way too much to accomplish and take care of in life to do it all yourself. The real reason we’re successful is because there are people around us who we can unconditionally trust. And when that trust is violated, it must be a horrible feeling.

This semester, and really for my whole life, I’ve been very lucky not to have to feel it.

Mike Lipka, a senior in the College of Communication, has been the editor of The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected].