This week is my final week as Editor-in-Chief for The Daily Eastern News.

This year as EIC has been equal parts challenging and rewarding and it has been the greatest honor of my life so far to become a part of the legacy of a great institution like the DEN.

Despite challenges caused by COVID-19, we were able to get back to work starting in August and put out a paper every day.

Many people across campus may not know this, but The Daily Eastern News is one of just two college newspapers in the state of Illinois that puts out a print issue every day.

It has been a very stressful year, to say the least, but it could have been much worse if not for my amazing staff here.

It has been a tremendous experience working with everyone here, and because of their incredibly hard and high-quality work, my job was made so much easier.

Together, we worked every night to put out the best newspaper we could, and I think we put out some very good ones.

I take pride in the fact that we cover the campus of Eastern like no one else truly can.

We are on campus every day, attending classes, going to the dining halls and then coming to Buzzard Hall at the end of the day to produce a newspaper.

We have been able to cover events like Black Lives Matter rallies on campus and in town and the ongoing discussions about renaming Douglas Hall.

We also covered the dark cloud of COVID-19 that has been hanging over everything for over a year.

I was naive when I first took the job, thinking that the pandemic would likely dissipate by the start of the Fall 2020 semester.

But obviously that was not the case. We had to cover the ways that COVID affected campus while also dealing with it ourselves.

Several of our staff members, including myself, tested positive for COVID over the last year, but we were still able work remotely and did not miss publishing a single paper.

I once again want to thank my staff for everything they have done this year, no matter how much or how little they did.

I am forever grateful to all of them for making this the best, albeit most unusual, year of my life.

I also want to thank our amazing advisor Lola Burnham, who will be retiring at the end of the semester, for her unwavering support, invaluable advice and love for student media.

This paper is the 142nd of the year for us, a number that is almost impossible for me to comprehend. Each one has been an absolute pleasure to produce, and I hope everyone enjoyed reading them.

Adam Tumino is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].