It is a running joke in my family that I am always the last to know about anything. My parents would typically mention something on Saturday afternoon about a relative coming for brunch on Sunday or the fact that my cousins would be staying the following Monday and would be sleeping in my room, and I would always respond, “Wait, what? When did that happen?” and they would always tell me they’d already told me a few nights before. I don’t know if I totally buy that; I kind of feel like they just like to keep me on my toes…or I just was a very poor listener in high school, which is also possible. Anyway, this was known in my family as the “last to know phenomenon,” in which Mary Kate is consistently the last to know about any given topic.
But, now that I’m a college student more than 700 miles from home, I feel like I’m more informed than ever before. I think it’s because I have this new “newsie sense” (like Spiderman’s spidey sense), which I think in some circles is also called “active listening skills.” I’m also super-connected on social media (I just made a Pinterest account today), and I am required to be informed of news for media writing. Most importantly, the stories I’m given for The Pendulum have served to make me even more informed than a normal college student, which makes me feel like a hipster (in a good way) because I know about things before they’re famous (or before people read about them in the paper).
For example, this past week, I wrote a story on the candidates for new director of campus safety and police. I was able to go to each candidate’s presentations, and then I was able to tell people all about it. This may not sound that exciting, but it’s a big change from being the last to know to being one of the first. My newsieness has broken the spell of my being the last to know about everything forever.