The newspaper you’re reading is the result of continuous efforts made by more than 80 NAU students. In addition to the writers whose stories you can read on these pages, every week dozens of surprisingly good-looking students work behind the scenes to design, edit, promote, fund, manage and distribute this paper. For this gumptious gang, the pay-per-hour they receive is almost as insulting as the feedback. Even so, in the face of finals, Facebook and “real jobs,” these students devote their time
and energy to what they believe to be a worthy cause.

With all the current budget cut nonsense, personally motivated efforts like these are critical to our educational experience. Unless our once-quaint university rapidly rearranges its priorities, class sizes will continue expanding, less lucrative programs will continue dissolving and students will continue bemoaning the loss of the enriching education they envisioned. Predictably, beseeching the university to prioritize its students appears to be a fruitless crusade. However, we can reap endless rewards if we proactively challenge our lovely selves to pursue learning beyond the classroom.

Whether it’s based in athleticism or astronomy, or born of a shared thirst for politics or poetry, student-run organizations, clubs and interest groups offer us the opportunity to synthesize our education with our passions. Through these groups, we harness the skills we’ve attained as college students (e.g., perseverance, critical analysis, how to shake off a hangover, etc.) toward personally meaningful goals. In this, we challenge our education to benefit us beyond a piece of paper that will endorse us as enlightened.

These student groups also provide us with the opportunity to meet, appreciate and be inspired by our like-minded peers. Better yet, these organizations allow us to meet, appreciate and be inspired by people who we’d otherwise avoid (were it not for our shared office, those guys from sales wouldn’t touch us with a 10-foot pole).

The resulting dynamic interaction gives us the chance to distinguish our own strengths and weaknesses, and it reveals the ways in which we are best equipped to contribute within organizations and society at large.

These kinds of lessons cannot be learned to such a rewarding degree in a classroom. Whether that’s because your teacher is painfully dull, or because your department is bearing the burden of larger constraints, is irrelevant. (Even the best teachers, bless them, could not possibly cover all the syllabus material and reveal to us our true selves in the course of one semester.) What does matter is that the option to be personally engaged in our learning experience exists; we simply have to seek it out.

Several of us found it through the creation of this paper. The motivation to participate in this organization is varied, but the benefit of our objectives is shared. Collectively, we challenge ourselves and each other to discover and surpass our own limitations.
Classrooms can provide wonderful opportunities to become knowledgeable about the world. Student organizations provide us the opportunity to exercise that knowledge and become students of ourselves.

For us, The Lumberjack student newspaper is that opportunity. What’s yours?