“What did you learn?” — Michaela Saunders, Daily news editor, screaming at every reporter who walks in the door

It is one of my last (and latest) nights at the Daily when the news breaks that the university has suspended assistant men’s basketball coach Steve Barnes. The newsroom has emptied a great deal. It is two hours till deadline. University relations has neglected to tell anyone at the Daily, though there was plenty of time to inundate us with press releases about happy news — origami displays, naming ceremonies.

But when the sexy stories break, my phone doesn’t ring. It is only our connections to other news organizations that let us know what’s shaking in the Athletics Department. It is 10:35 — 25 minutes to our press deadline — when I finally reach John McCarroll, director of university relations.

“I’m dealing with a lot of phone calls right now, Cavan,” he says.

Although it is one of my last nights at the Daily, I am re-energized with that excitement that started it all — that need to report, to talk to people, to get and share the news.

My bylines haven’t frequented the Daily a great deal this year, nor have my columns. I miss the days of kids on my dorm floor freaking out because of a photograph on the front page of two men kissing or a device called “Sister Strap-On,” only minutes later realizing I am the one who wrote the story.

It has been a year since I was a regular columnist and people still stumble up to me at the bars and ask if I’m that kid who wrote that “I’m a black lesbian” column. It had been months since I’d been energized by that need to report, since I was running around trying to snag interviews. I was so close to my Daily retirement, and it could have been one of the most stressful shifts. But instead it was what this job should have been all along. It was fun.

And when I’ve been asked to wrap up this year in this office, that’s the word that comes up the most: fun. Stressful and chaotic at times, yes. But it’s been fun.

One week left to go, and a friend starts grilling me about what I’ll be doing when I start my job at The Des Moines Register. “It’s editing and that kind of stuff, right?” he asks. When I confirm that, yes, I will be a copy editor and working with headlines, editing and design and not reporting, he’s happy.

“So you won’t be one of those people who pries into other people’s personal lives?” he says.

This attitude makes me question the career field I’m stepping in to. It makes me sad, but it’s true — I’ve already survived a year of that anti-journalist stereotype on this campus, in the worst case spending several hours at a party with a Government of the Student Body campaign manager railing me about an editorial that bashed his candidates.

But even that was fun.

There will be days I look back and wonder how things could have been different here. But this single year witnessed enough change to fill my plate. A new staff, a new design, a remodeled office. A five-part series on an ISU student who was killed in a hit and run, an experiment in narrative journalism, and more projects and series than the Daily published before.

This has been a good time, thanks in large part to too many people to name in this space. And though it’s cheesy, it’s become true this semester that the Daily kids have become a family, one that is now breaking up as several of us move on to other endeavors.

All things have their end. Looks like this is mine.

Thanks for reading. It’s been swell.