A final USM summer
Cayley Bowman, Co Editor-in-Chief.
I always imagined that my last summer as a student enrolled at USM would be spent traveling and goofing off, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Going into my senior year, I wanted to gain experience in the field I wanted to pursue after graduating. I got an internship at the Morning Sentinel, a newspaper in Central Maine, and commuted from home.
While the better half of my summer was spent doing this internship and working my part-time job, I found the experience delightful and enlightening. I have been on the school paper since I first started as a freshman, but this was much different. I was able to interact with professional journalists and photographers, as well as interview locals about the stories I was able to work on. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to spend my summer interning at the paper, as it helped me ensure that this is what I want to do with my degree in Media Studies.
After my internship ended in mid-July, I spent the rest of my summer working. Luckily, I did have more days off, and I was able to spend them with my pets and significant other. The most memorable trip of my summer was when I went to Bar Harbor with my two best friends. My favorite part of this summer was when I got a kitten with my boyfriend, Melly.
Although it is always hard to move into the school year, there are many things I am looking forward to in my final year here. I am excited to be one of the editor-in-chiefs this year, and I hope to keep it in the upstanding condition it was last year, when Dakota Eddy held this position. I also want to spend my senior having fun and not just focusing on school, as important as that is.
My fall semester is also going to be filled with a lot of concerts. At the end of September, I will be seeing Noah Kahn in Connecticut, and in October, I will be seeing The Front Bottoms in Boston and Set It Off in Portland. I have always been big into music, so I am most looking forward to these concerts that will be taking up some of my weekends.
I am most excited to be seeing The Front Bottoms. I first got into their music the summer going into my junior year of high school on a trip to Boston with my friend Allison, who is, at this point, practically my sister. She has been a fan of theirs since she was in middle school, and I loved them as soon as she showed me their song ‘Au Revoir (Adios).’ Since then, we have been to some of their concerts and enjoy everyone as much as the other. This will be my first time leaving the state for one of their concerts, and it is for our friend’s 21st birthday.
While I think the Fall semester is going to bring a lot of stress along with it, I am excited about the small moments that I am going to get to experience with those closest to me. Plus, all the hard work is worth it in the end, and that’s what I will keep telling myself.