LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

The end of the school year has snuck up on us quite suddenly. It seems like just yesterday we were asking people about what they did on their winter breaks, but now the conversation has all-too-disquietingly shifted to what people will be doing over the summer or after graduation. The fast-approaching end hangs over our heads like that rain cloud that follows Wile E. Coyote wherever he goes.

As first years, when we meet a new second year or MIPP, we can’t help but wonder if it’s worth the effort of the small talk we’re making with someone who, in a matter of weeks, we will in all likelihood never see again.

Andrew Duff’s article this month explores the question of goals and regrets as the school year and many of your SAIS experiences come to an end. It’s hard not to feel as though you could have met more people, been more involved in student life, studied harder, done more internships, or whatever your personal regrets may be.

Here at the Observer we have our regrets too. We wish we could have been wittier and made you laugh a little more, we wish we had another issue in which we could cover the emerging Hopkins student loan scandal and the even-more-emerging-and-more-scandalous World Bank corruption story (these events were strategically timed at the end of the SAIS school year, we suspect, just so we couldn’t cover them). And we wish that on occasion we had simply kept our mouths (and pens) shut.

Yet the nature of a 2 year masters program is that it will never be enough time to make of it all that you wish you could.  It’s barely enough time to find out what you want to make of it in the first place.

For what it’s worth, it was a pleasure and an honor getting to know the 2nd years and MIPPs this year. We have been floored by the knowledge and experience you bring to the table, and sometimes it’s been the alcohol you’ve brought to the table that has quite literally floored us. We wish you the best of luck in the future — and not only because the higher you climb the better the chances you will help us get jobs next year.

We’d also like to thank everyone who has contributed to the Observer over the past year and in particular the three former editors, Sole Birnbaum, Eric Jaffe and Jon Raviv, to whom we can never hope to compare, at least in density of Jewishness.

Yet in the cloud of nostalgia, we look forward to the excitement of new experiences. New jobs and locales for second years, summer internships for first years, and the prospect of having about 300 new students on the DC campus next year (fresh meat!) And for those of you who fear change, no need to worry, the good old Observer will be here to cover it all (now online too…) with the mix of humor, cynicism and complete irreverance you’ve come to expect.