There are a few things I have learned in my three-and-a-half years at MSU that are concrete: Unless I have an 8 a.m. class, I will not get out of bed before 10 a.m. - even if I tell myself the night before that I will get up at dawn to work out. It isn’t going to happen.

I know that if I chug out of a bottle that has a plastic sombrero for a cap, very bad things happen.

I know that even though I will be here another year, I can’t stop my friends from graduating and moving away. But I can make them feel really guilty - that’s kinda fun.

And I know that as long as classes are in session, The State News will publish Monday through Friday.

It’s a minor part of the average MSU student’s daily life, I know. The students in my criminal justice class don’t get the same little rush that I do in the morning as we pick the paper up on our way into class. It’s the same feeling I get on Christmas morning - even if I know what I’m about to unwrap - I haven’t seen the tangible object yet, just pictures of it.

And my classmates don’t know I’m watching them read the latest edition. I can tell which stories their eyes fall on first, where they stop reading and if they jump with the story from Page One to the inside. That’s the worst.

My favorite is when people rip on the paper from two rows behind me. I once heard from a brunette in my science class, “If they don’t have the time to do the paper right, they shouldn’t do it at all.” We misspelled a word in a headline and she’s telling us to pack our bags?

I’ll be the first to admit that we mess up from time to time. I’ve even caused some of the errors or didn’t catch someone else’s. And it’s probably going to happen again before I’m out of here. We make mistakes, we correct them, we learn from them and we move on to the next day’s edition, a little smarter than we were the day before.

We’re not perfect. We’re students. We’re going to mess up, not because we’re lazy, don’t care or are not good at our jobs - we have the awards to dispute that. It’s because, like our target audience, we are learning. Sometimes we get something wrong, but more times than not we get it right. And sometimes we get it right before any other news organization. That’s a better feeling than the Christmasy one.

We get no funding from MSU. We are not published through the School of Journalism. We are a student-run paper - and one of the largest in the country at that. I work with about 70 students (not including our advertising department, also student-run) to put together a product that is, more times than not, a pretty good read.

There have been times that I’ve looked around the newsroom - 60 people crammed into two rooms the equivalent of three rooms in Berkey Hall, old newspapers piled in the corner, pizza boxes overflowing from the garbage cans, phones ringing, editors shouting questions to reporters, designers shouting headline sizes to copy editors and across the hall photographers are analyzing rolls of film for the best shot - and I have to wonder how we close the paper by 11:30 p.m. Then I remember that there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing and I’m pretty sure most of the staff feels the same. I hope they do.

It’s 2 a.m. on Thursday as I write this and there’s a half-dozen State Newsers working on our special Martin Luther King Jr. section. By this time in the week, they’ve all put in 30 to 40 hours and most of them are carrying 12 or more credits. Our design editor has another job. They all have friends who would like to spend time with them. And maybe they’re a little tired. But they’re not at home studying, or at the bar or sleeping. They’re working on the best product they can. It’s going to be great. And they’re not complaining, they’re laughing and telling stories. Granted, they’re hopped up on caffeine, but they’re still laughing.

I don’t expect you to feel sorry for us. I don’t. I only mention all this so that maybe when you pick up the paper in the morning and then sit down in class next to some blurry-eyed kid in a State News T-shirt, you’ll understand.

And maybe if you have a complaint about us, whether we spelled a name wrong or aren’t covering something you think we should, you won’t think it’s because we don’t care. And if you let us know what you feel we’ve done wrong, we can try to fix it.

We don’t do this for the money - we don’t make a lot. And we really don’t do it for the recognition - some of our hardest-working staff members rarely, if ever, get their names in the paper. We do it because we believe in our product.

I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now. Maybe I’ll have graduated, maybe not.

But I know that I will know the best four years of my life were spent at MSU, and more specifically, in Student Services.

And I know I will still be leery of sombrero-capped bottles.

Mary Sell, State News Editor in Chief, can be reached at sellmary@msu.edu.