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Everybody at the Daily Bruin talks about quitting.

One more 16-hour day, and I’m outta here. If I get another C, the newspaper has to go. When my fingers automatically dial the long-distance code every time I pick up a phone, I’m done. Yes, the word “quit” gets thrown around as much as stress balls fly at the heads of assistant editors.

But its frequency has rendered the word almost meaningless. Each time it slips out of the mouths of exhausted editors or overworked writers, it simply bounces around gray-carpeted bulletin boards – or “walls,” as we like to call them – and is heard by no one.

That is, until someone actually quits.

I did it. Midway into my year as news editor, I stepped out from a tiny cubicle in that mystical windowless office in Kerckhoff Hall. Some might call it freedom, others abandonment. I say inevitable. It wasn’t the long days, the rarity of making it to class or my inability to get out of “DB mode” that led to my decision. It was simply the fact that my time was up.

By quitting, I was leaving so many stories untold, voices unheard and friends yet to be made. Still, my departure helped me realize that The Bruin was more than the chaos of daily production or a collective of aspiring journalists. It is a generation-old machine that takes its young staff and gives them a direction to their futures. To me, it showed a path to an early exit.

It is when the wise old Bruin tells you to quit – and only then – that you do it.

Like most “extracurricular” activities (try explaining to The Bruin staff that 50-hour weeks in the office are supposed to be extracurricular), working at a college newspaper arms students with invaluable experience. On a daily basis, we refine our analytical abilities and learn how to work together. We gain interpersonal skills by dealing with a frustrated source, and we quickly get a lesson in law when that source threatens to sue. We are constantly on the peak of current events.

We are a mill generating ideas faster than we know what to do with. We learn endlessly from our successes, like the investigative report on shoddy construction of a new housing complex. But we learn infinitely more from our blunders, like a rape photo illustration gone hopelessly wrong. We learn from each other, and we meet people we’ll know forever.

During my time at The Bruin – those hours of discussion in the conference room with my fellow Edi-Boarders, that interview with a struggling, undocumented student, and that five-hour USAC meeting in which I cursed my editors to death – I got my college education.

The Bruin shows its staff how to make a difference in the community, even if it’s something as small as improving the UCLA Web site. And with this prospect of making a difference, The Bruin ignites in its staff a desire to save the world. That’s what I’m off to do, and I’ll be eternally grateful to The Bruin for showing me the way.

And to those of you who wonder what it feels like to finally get up and act on the word that lingers perpetually inside the Daily Bruin office, it’s bittersweet. But seeing the sun for the first time in two and a half years is fabulous.

Fernando was the news editor until the middle of winter 2005. In addition to the sun, she also saw blue sky, birds and her roommates after two and a half years.