I am Ioana Racu and I have been Managing Editor of The Triangle since 2022. I have seen the paper go from a team of five people to a grant-winning newsroom in less than two years and as I am entering my senior year, it is time for me to step down and have the new generation of editors continue what we started. I came to college from Romania to study journalism at Drexel. I’ve always dreamed of being part of an investigative journalism team. I quickly realized that I couldn’t do that in a class- room, so I had to find an environment where I could do that in my free time. I got rejected the first time I applied to The Triangle because my writing skills were still in their teen-age years, but I didn’t give up and reapplied during the pandemic while stuck in my home country. I started my time here as a copy editor and quickly evolved into being a news writer. After six months of silence, I stepped into the Managing Editor position. There were few of us with little knowledge of how to properly run a newspaper, but we eventually put out a special edition Graduation edition on June 10, 2022. Production nights were long and loud because we had to learn everything from scratch, but those were probably some of the most valuable moments I have
experienced during college. Good newsrooms create long-lasting friendships that will never hesitate to bring the right amount of honesty into your life. I’ve seen my peers interview mayoral and Senate candidates, local musicians backstage at Made in America, create very detailed crosswords and analyze the World Cup games in a way I never could. I am so thankful to have managed a growing team of almost 60 members and see each section grow bigger after each recruitment cycle. Knowing that The Triangle has the resources to produce a documentary shows the immense growth of our paper. Last year, we were reporting from the nosebleed seats at a John Fetterman rally, but members of The Triangle are definitely ready to be front-row journalists everywhere they go now!