If you’re an editor reading this and thinking, “Who the hell is Ishika Samant?” it’s probably because I haven’t worked at The Battalion in about a year. Saying that out loud feels strange, especially after spending three years in the basement that taught me how to zone out five people talking at once, how to laugh through impossible deadlines and, most of all, how to find my voice.

I came to Texas A&M as a biomedical sciences major. Technically, I’m still graduating with that degree. But for a long time, I lived under the illusion that it was the career path I was supposed to follow. Get the grades. Become a doctor. Buy the house. Drive the car. The Battalion was never part of that vision. In fact, it felt like a distraction — something that might throw everything off track.

I kept telling myself I could step away. That I could move it aside, focus on school, stay the course. But every time I tried, something pulled me back. And every time I returned, I stayed a little longer.

Because the truth is, The Batt was the first place where I felt like my voice mattered. Where it wasn’t just heard, but needed. The stories we told inside those four basement walls weren’t perfect, but they were honest. They were bold. And they were carried on the backs of students who gave everything they had, not because they were told to, but because they believed the truth was worth it.

I started as an assistant photo chief during a time when the university president called for us to be shut down. I ended my time as summer managing editor just after the university pulled Dr. Kathleen McElroy’s offer to lead the journalism program. Somehow, I lived through two versions of the same story. The same silencing, the same erasure. And yet, through it all, we kept writing, we kept taking photos, we kept designing pages. We kept printing.

The Batt is more than a paper. It is the spirit of A&M journalism. It is the voice that refuses to be quiet. It is the fire that still burns in a school that has forgotten how to protect it. In that basement, against all odds, a group of students built something real. Something that should have crumbled long ago, but didn’t.

When I stepped onto this campus, I never imagined that this is where I’d end up. But now, as I prepare to leave Aggieland, I realize I never really studied biomedical science. I studied The Batt. I studied how to care. How to lead. How to fight for stories that matter.

It won’t show up on my diploma. Maybe it’s just a single line on a resume. But it’s a title I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Because no one tells stories better than a room full of scrappy students in a basement.