There are a lot of things I expected to get out of The Villanovan, but I never expected the person standing beside me to become the center of it. There is a moment, every week, when the world outside the Corr Hall basement fades away and it becomes just us again. Two people who somehow stumbled into the same job and then into the kind of partnership you cannot predict and cannot force. A partnership that becomes a friendship before you even have the chance to realize it.
I think about how far apart Brooke Ackerman’s and my lives were before this year. We lived in separate corners of campus. We circled different people. We chased different passions. For a long time, we existed in the same newsroom without really knowing each other. And then, we learned that we would share the title of co-Editor-in-Chief, and everything shifted. From the first week, something settled between us that I still can’t fully explain. It was like recognizing that the person next to me understood the paper the same way I did, and that made everything easier.
Brooke became my partner in the truest sense. We started tossing around “BPE,” short for best partner ever, as a quick way to celebrate a good fix or a well-handled issue. But somewhere along the way, it stopped being silly. Brooke really was the best partner ever. She understood what I needed before I even said anything. She read my stress before I recognized it myself.
We always joked that The Villanovan made us the same person, but it wasn’t really a joke. Spending so much time together made it impossible not to notice how much we started to overlap. We would show up in the same outfit without planning it, or we would say the same thing at the same time and just laugh because it had happened again. There were nights when we were completing pages until early in the morning and could understand each other without saying a word, just a glance or a gesture over the center table. The little coincidences piled up until it didn’t feel like a coincidence at all.
Working with Brooke taught me more than I realized in the moment. She showed me what it looks like to be confident and to stand by my ideas, even when it feels easier not to. She taught me how to speak up for myself, how to take pride in my work and how to care deeply about the things that matter. Brooke is one of the most dedicated people I have ever met. When she commits to something, she pours her whole self into it, and watching her do that has made me want to be better, too. What she brought to this paper is only part of it. Brooke is the kind of person I admire, the kind of person I genuinely hope to grow into and the kind of friend I know I’ll hold onto long after our bylines stop appearing together.
The thing that surprised me most is that our partnership stopped being about the paper a long time ago. Yes, Brooke was my co-EIC, but she also became my friend in a way that has nothing to do with production nights or emails or constant meetings. The trust we built didn’t come from our titles. It came from the small moments in between: the walks back to West at 2 a.m., our life catch ups, the shared frustration, the shared wins, the way she made even the worst nights feel lighter just by sitting across from me.
All this to say, thank you to my BPE. This year was hard in the ways leadership always is, but it was good because Brooke was part of it. That partnership became the best part of the job, and it’s something I’ll miss far more than I can print on this page.
