Welcome to the last issue.
I’m writing this on the final print night of Critic Te Arohi for 2021. We’ve made 26 issues of this magazine for you over the year. That means that I get to be nostalgic in this editorial.
At the start of the year, 26 issues seemed like a lot. A lot of pages, a lot of time, a lot of ideas to put into action. But looking back it all happened incredibly quickly, and lockdown helped to speed up this last stretch.
Throughout the year, we’ve consumed a lot of Nando’s and Poppa’s Pizza (thanks to our #sponsors #capitalism). We’ve had a lot of late nights. We’ve drunk a lot of DoBros. We’ve talked to hundreds of Otago students for stories. We’ve transcribed hours and hours of those interviews. We’ve published over a thousand pages of this magazine.
Critic has been running for 96 years now. I started working at the magazine back in 2019, so I’ve only been here for a tiny sliver of that time. But it feels good to have been a small part of that history. If you like writing, or illustrating, or photography, I would encourage you to get involved. We’re always looking for students to publish in the magazine.
If you’d told me in my first year (2016, aka I am old) that I would have ended up editing Critic I would have been surprised. Embarrassingly I didn’t even realise that you could pick up Critic, for free, until a few months into Uni.
I’m proud of the magazine we made in 2021. It is truly a team effort. Critic wouldn’t be able to print one single page of the magazine if I didn’t have such amazing, talented people to rely on. They have made my job easy.
I’m proud to have made this magazine for you for a whole year, but I won’t be back in 2022. It’s been exhilarating but exhausting.
What a ride.
Good luck for exams and have a good summer. Critic will be back in all its glory, with a slightly different team, at the start of next year.