Keira
Graduation crept closer with the kind of quiet inevitability that made ordinary days feel suddenly significant, every lecture, every final assignment, every walk across a campus that had witnessed the strangest, most transformative year of my life carrying a weight I hadn't expected to feel until the very end.
I finished my capstone project the week before finals, submitting the final draft with a mixture of pride and disbelief that I'd actually managed to produce real, substantive journalism amid everything else that had unfolded around me. My professor's feedback, when it came back, included a note I read three times just to make sure I hadn't imagined it.
*This is exactly the kind of work that gets noticed. Well done.*
I brought the news home that evening, home now meaning whe
