Thousands of students, thousands of stories
By Zoey Duncan
Our humble school is approaching its 100th birthday and now seems as good a time as any to take notice of how we, the students, present our school to the rest of Calgary, and to the world.
Is the MRU campus just a haphazard conglomeration of people who happen to have school in common? With students in attendance from across the city, across the world, and across generations, the student body could easily be divided into a few thousand cliques and left to float through their time here as they pursue degrees, diplomas and certificates. While it would be all too simple for that to happen, there are plenty of amusements and curiosities to distract you from engaging in the community, like going to see a Cougars’ game, or joining a club, or finally getting on stage at the Lib for karaoke.
You might agree with me that people often seek education to better themselves, be it intellectually, financially or, hey, even socially.
With that in mind, is there a better place to breed a vibrant community than a campus full of opinionated, creative and intelligent people who are in the middle of constructing their future? A student-run newspaper has the opportunity, if not the obligation, to make that a reality.
Stuart Hall, a communic-ation theorist, built his theory of cultural studies around the notion that mass media propagates the status quo and fails to account for the opinions of the little guys. As a campus paper, we have the opportunity to cover stories that the big corporation-owned papers don’t, won’t or can’t.
The reality of journalism today is that audiences get a huge amount of their news electronically in brief, rapidly updated blurbs.
As progressive, 21st century students in an institution dedicated to higher education that is noteworthy for its focus on real-world applications of knowledge, we have the advantage of being steeped in technology, along with the ability to use it.
In contrast to the big papers in town, we have the capability to provide hyper-local coverage. Lucky for us, our pool of writers at MRU is over 13,000 strong, so in theory, we have 13,000 stories waiting to be written. What’s not so lucky is that those stories are indeed waiting to be written and students are a bit shy about getting it done. If we have anything in common as students, it’s unyielding procrastination.
So, until those thousands of stories, those 13,000 perceptions of life at Mount Royal University, are written, I’m committed to finding out what students care about, what their constant and daily aggravations are, and what should be done to make our institution a point of pride.
