A Series Of Unfortunate Events

I was unlucky enough to become the President of The Record’s CXXI Editorial Board. It isn’t that I disliked my time at The Record, I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it, but rather the path I took to get where I am today was purely unlucky.
The first unfortunate event to befall me happened within my first day as a Prep. Due to a scheduling conflict, I was forced to take photo as my art instead of theater. (Fun Fact #1: My schedule has had conflicts every single year I have been at Hotchkiss.) At the time this was extremely disappointing news, but as is evident by the fact that I am currently still taking upper-level photography and have spent the last three winters as a sports photographer, I have adapted pretty well to that change. The biggest thing that this ended up leading to was me joining The Record as a photographer during my Prep spring.
The months went on and I progressed as a photographer and even started helping out the photo editor at the time, Harry Roepers ’19, with some of the organizational things. That winter I applied to be a photo editor on the CXX board. If you could not tell where this is going I’ll let you in on a little secret: I did not get that position. In fact, I did not get any position. At this point, I would like to thank the CXIX executive board for that decision.
I dedicated the next couple weeks of my life to learning the wonderful tool known as InDesign. For those of you who have been fortunate enough to not have to deal with a hidden text box causing a mysterious indent on the third line of a paragraph, InDesign is how we make each issue look as good as the New York Times. Under the guidance of Edward Guo ’19, I worked my way to the position of design editor a couple of weeks into the CXX board’s reign. (Fun Fact #2: The first layout I got to go to was the April Fool’s issue because I was asked to do a bunch of photoshops including the legendary DOBO photo.)
As design editor, I completely redid the entire style of the paper so that readers were no longer greeted with Comic Sans numbers in bright colors, but instead the perfectly spaced and aligned layout you have come to expect of us (Ok… maybe not that perfect, but it was a step in the right direction.) I also may or may not have missed a few study halls in the process.
The time came once again to apply for the next editorial board and now here I am one year later writing this farewell. The way two unlucky events managed to make someone who has only written one article in their entire time at Hotchkiss the president of a newspaper is beyond me. I truly am very lucky to be so unlucky.

— Nicholas “El Presidente” Lorentzen