I would have done anything to go to the University of Michigan.

I applied to four other schools during my senior year at Stoughton High School; still, Michigan was the place for me. Everything I did, every club I feigned interest in and every essay draft I tore apart and rewrote was all in hope of convincing the right number of admissions officers that I belonged in Ann Arbor.

In early February of 2004, I received a letter in a small envelope with the University’s seal on it. Small envelopes spell doom in the world of college admissions. I tore it open waiting for the inevitable rejection before receiving a faint slice of hope ‘- I had been waitlisted. The letter advised me to keep my grades up because my application would be reviewed again shortly.

The rejection letter came two months later. My enrollment letter to UMass, the first of four colleges I would gain acceptance to, was postmarked the next day. It wasn’t Michigan, but there is enough distance between Amherst and Stoughton, Mass., to keep me from spending every weekend at home.

UMass wasn’t part of my plan, but it worked out in the end. After five years, three perfect ones spent in the gloomy Collegian newsroom, I’d like to thank whoever made the final call in Ann Arbor for rejecting me.

All I wanted to do was make money.

I stayed diligent in my schoolwork. Good grades meant a good job. A good job meant money ‘- money was everything. I listened to professors who spent their entire professional lives as accountants cranking out numbers or consultants deciding who was valuable enough to keep their jobs.

After a year and a half, my grade-point average was lofty. But when I actually thought about what I had learned, I couldn’t come up with much. I’d acquired no skills, no relevant knowledge. All I knew was that if I wrote what professors told me to write and finagled my way in and out of math classes, I would be fine.

As the spring 2005 semester began, I knew my departure from the UMass Isenberg School of Management was imminent. I enrolled in a journalism class and fell in love with the profession within a month. There was something beautiful about the pieces we read. I imagined myself in a press box during Game 6 of the 1975 World Series and how my version of Carlton Fisk’s home run would have read, or how Boston Bruins fans would remember Bobby Orr’s game-winning goal in Game 4 of the 1970 Stanley Cup finals if they read my game story the next morning.

I didn’t come to college with the intention of becoming a ‘news jock,’ as journalism professor Ralph Whitehead calls those who dedicate their lives to The Collegian, but I can’t imagine my time at UMass had I not. There are countless journalism students with better GPAs than mine, but none of them have what I have down at The Collegian.

None of them know a group of people who they share a professional and personal life with. None of them spent their time in college interviewing Nobel Prize winners or flying to North Carolina in the middle of finals with two of their best friends to cover soccer games or driving to Buffalo, N.Y., in the middle of winter to cover a weeklong swim meet ‘- or dancing to Whitney Houston while standing on a chair in Charlie’s during one fateful Collegian Bar Crawl.

Like I said, their grades are better than mine. But I didn’t come to college to get good grades. I came here to grow and get an education. It just so happened that I did most of that in a gloomy basement-turned-newsroom with a bunch of people that quickly became my family.

A gloomy basement that will always be in my heart, a gloomy basement that, no matter where I end up, will always be my home.

Joe Meloni was the managing editor of The Daily Collegian. He can be reached at [email protected].