From the Desks of Mike Maune and Emily Race:

We have been the voices of Anderson University in this newsletter for the past year. Our goal has been to keep you informed of campus news and events, to introduce you to some of the personalities of the university, and to help you stay connected to the AU community. During the past year, we have interviewed professors, forgotten deadlines, and toted cameras all over AU. Through late highly-caffeinated writing sessions, the approaching or past deadlines, and long-awaited interviews, we've endeavored to discover and communicate what Anderson University is all about, gaining new insights in each article. We edited each other, shared contacts, and sympathized over difficult interviews and complicated sentences. Yet this is the first article we’ve written together. Its purpose is to tell you a little about each of us and what it’s meant to be your eyes and ears on campus.

Mike Maune

The experience of sharing a view of campus life here at AU has been wonderfully rewarding. As I’ve striven to describe the important people and events that create the college community, I’ve grown in my own ability to relate to people whose stories I can only guess at that first handshake. What I’ve learned through writing for you, my audience, is that you really cannot measure the effect one person has on the world, but you can try to show why that life matters. But even that is too large an assignment, so I’ve tried to show you who the people you’ve read about are to AU. But now, it’s my turn.

I’ve never really known what I wanted to write about. It’s funny; I grew up writing stories and poems and articles for my school newspaper. But I just wanted to write—I didn’t necessarily have a particular topic I always wanted to write about. I’ve tried different types of writing: creative, analytical, and newswriting. When I was much younger, I published several poems for children’s magazines. Later, I turned my focus to newswriting, and I wrote for a local newspaper for a semester. It was because of this stint at the newspaper that I ended up writing for you. Kim Wolfe took a look at my work—which involved several in-depth profile pieces, the staple of the Parent Connection—and I ended up on this journey getting to know the AU community in a way I never thought possible. As an English major, I tended to see things from a fairly narrow perspective because all my writing was about the books I was reading. But through my work covering the campus, I was exposed to people from all sorts of backgrounds, with different stories and interests and ways of looking at things. Each time I sat down to an interview, my goal was to connect with them so that I could help you connect to our campus. I hope I have been a good window to look through—one that lets all of the many sights of good deeds, hard work, and diligent studies come alive in the people that walk through our campus each day and make it a great and lively place to be.

Emily Race

I’m a Secondary Language Arts Education major, so writing comes with the territory. In 2003, I came to Anderson from Springfield, Ohio, hoping that my impression of the student population – friendly, pretty diverse, and quirky – was accurate. Fortunately for me and everyone else, it was. I met many amazing people in my first few weeks at AU, and the university continued to amaze me throughout my four years. I traveled to Toronto, Greece, and England through Tri-S; visited Hicksville, Ohio through AUCME; sang and played in Women’s Chorus and Symphonic Band; participated in any activity the English department offered; and learned archery. Through it all, what I loved most were the people: the bizarre, messy, godly, talented, wonderful people. When I had the opportunity to show off these people to parents and alumni, I was excited.

When I began writing for Kim Wolfe in the Alumni Office, I had minimal experience in reporting news and interviewing people. I had written articles for Signatures, the alumni magazine, and created portfolios of research, but I knew academic and fiction writing best. Therefore, I treated the articles like stories. After all, I was telling the story of Anderson University – tiny components of a greater work, thousands of individuals pursuing a few ideals. I found as I wrote that I began to see AU in a different way myself. It was full of people doing amazing things – and they were my peers! I have seen students create businesses, work for charity, support each other, discover academic success, and fight for causes. I have been challenged, encouraged, and inspired by the people around me, and that is the story I have tried to tell you.

This is our part of the larger story that continually grows and changes every day here at AU. We are immersed in it, constantly reminded of the great history our college bears as a memorial to the spirit guiding our community. Our role has been to be the messengers, the scribes of the story we find ourselves in. But more importantly, we have taken seriously the responsibility of helping you, the parents of our students, feel connected to the experience your son or daughter is having. You shaped the student body here before they even knew what a promissory note or dorm loft was. It’s been a fantastic opportunity getting to know many of them. We hope we’ve done their stories some justice and drawn you into the ongoing tale of this unique and exciting learning community at Anderson University.