As the year winds to a close, we bid farewell to the senior editors of The Centipede’s 61st Editorial Board. The board was headed by Co-Editors-in-Chief Aurora Hao ’25 and Daniel Xu ’25. The board featured four senior section editors. Lucy Newman ’25 co-edited News, while Jake Xu ’25 and Audrey Wu ’25 co-edited Arts. Drew Michaeli ’25 worked on sports. In the media section, Grace Guo ’25 was Head Media Editor, and Alan Wei ’25 was Head Web Editor. Axel Kapoor ’25 and Cam Levesque ’25 served as staff writers. Each senior member of The Centipede brought great passion and experience to the role, as well as true eagerness to lead.

Over the past five years, The Centipede has grown significantly in the number of staff, giving Daniel and Aurora the task of managing it. With the large team of editors and staff writers, Daniel and Aurora had to effectively communicate to a large group, working with all editors and staff writers to get issues published smoothly. Both were tasked with a leadership challenge and rose to it.

Across the board, The Centipede saw remarkable growth. Drew and Daniel focused on teaching, running several workshops on journalistic writing. These workshops focused on crafting strong arguments in Opinions pieces, writing in a journalistic style, and overall improving the journalistic writing of the newspaper. These workshops benefited new writers and aided those with confusion surrounding The Centipede’s and overall journalistic style. Drew and Daniel also worked to organize workshops and trips for editors to conferences, hoping to expand The Centipede’s reach and impact.

Under the leadership of Daniel, Aurora, and the rest of the seniors of the board, The Centipede was truly able to flourish. All brought a great passion and enthusiasm to the role. When asked what he was most proud of during this year, Daniel responded, “Definitely the diversity of voices we’ve been able to showcase. It has been great to not only feature more ‘atypical’ voices, but also include actively disagreeing perspectives on a single issue to feature more dialogue.” The paper this year has been able to feature new forms of dialogue, with a revival of the ’80’s The Grape.

Daniel and Aurora further worked with our web team to redesign and update the website, creating a new relationship between the newspaper and visual media. Daniel said, “It’ll be a challenging transition, but we think the new digital format will create a more interconnected community as the publication becomes interactive.”

Both emphasized timeliness as an area for growth. Aurora in particular spoke about her hopes for more open and easy communication between writers and editors, stating, “Whether it be asking for an extension or reminding writers to revise, we hope to see more active and responsive communication from everyone.” Daniel added, “So going into next year, with an editorial board that has a year, or two years of experience under their belt, we would really like to see a tighter ship being run, so to speak.”

It’s been an incredible year at The Centipede, in large part due to our senior leadership. From the Co-Editors-in-Chiefs to each section and media editor, the graduating seniors made the paper what it is today over their past four years. It has been a defining year, from the website redesign to working to create more dialogue within the paper. Each senior has been and continues to be an integral part of the team and an incredible role model, and we cannot imagine the paper without them.