I’ll wrap up this week with another post or two about my senior year at Pitt.
There is stuttering and the things we do — what we try to say, who we try to meet. But there is also a lot of fear and not wanting to engage. Just totally shutting something down before it can even happen. Despite the benefits, despite the pushing from friends or family.
During my junior year at Pitt, I was the assistant news editor. I went with the editor in chief, the news editor and the managing editor to interview the chancellor in his office. I don’t remember what we talked about. The state of the university, probably. Rising tuition costs, vision for the future, that sort of thing. There might have been some “tough” questions thrown in there.
So when I became editor my senior year, I should have done this. But I remember thinking, yeah, no, there’s no way this is going to happen. I’m not going to go in front of the chancellor and his staff and try to ask questions. And it’s not like the kind of thing that I could have just farmed out to my news editor, either.
This bothered me somewhat, but not too much. At this point I was a mechanical engineering major, and had no interest to pursue journalism after graduating. There were some of my editors who did, though. For this I did feel pretty bad.
I look back at that year of being editor and wonder if I couldn’t have done more — gone out more, talked to more people, engaged with the community a lot more. But I was afraid to. The stutter kept me back. I was content letting others do the asking and the conversing.
Hello. I stutter. 