I’m happy and excited to wish a warm welcome to all our readers, both new and returning – and hopefully many new writers.
My greatest hope as the new Editor of your weekly student newspaper is that you see The Badger as a platform which anyone and everyone can use to get the most out of their time here at Sussex. I see my own role and that of the team as facilitating dialogue between the people within our university community. We’re not here to tell you what to think or what it’s like being a student today – we’re here to interact with you and, together, build a paper which reflects your interests and those of the people around you. After all, this is your paper. I want every Badger reader to feel that it belongs to them: we may be the official Student’s Union Newspaper and funded by the Students’ Union but our duty is to you, students and readers, and making sure you both enjoy and profit from our content is our number one priority.
This year’s Freshers Edition Special is designed to introduce you to the university in all its complexity – we have a brilliant feature updating you on the most important News stories we broke last year and how they have developed over the summer, an essay in Features on the radical history of the university and an interesting Science feature explaining some of the research Sussex students are doing. I also had the pleasure of interviewing our new Vice-Chancellor.
This special edition is also about introducing you to the beautiful city of Brighton, and in Arts you will find out just how vibrant is the culture around us.
I’m aware that not everyone coming to Sussex this year may be equally excited to be here – numbers of Clearing students have gone up – but I hope that this edition helps everyone get to grips with our university and our city, and fall just a little in love with it.
Finally, I would like to say thank you to the wonderful team who have worked from near and afar to produce this edition. It hasn’t always been easy, and it was sometimes even exhausting (I spent 13-hour days in the office!) so I hope our readers will graciously forgive any typos… I’m very proud of this edition: I hope that you will enjoy it and feel inspired to get involved and join in with producing this paper every week.
