Law school final exams start a week earlier than the rest of the University’s, so, as you read this, I’m likely either taking my Trusts and Estates exam or furiously preparing for my Federal Courts one. As a result, this column, my last one, is going to be short and sweet.

Graduating Sun columnists’ swan songs generally contain two traditional elements: one relatively mandatory, and one technically frowned upon.

The mandatory tradition: explaining your column’s moniker.

The illicit one: thanking every single person you met during your time on The Hill.

I guess I’ll tackle the illicit one first by essentially bypassing it completely and thus likely making my editor very happy: When you’ve been around for seven years, compiled two degrees (assuming I pass Federal Courts) and worked as an editor on two substantial publications along the way, you meet and work with a lot of students, professors and the like. If I tried to list them all here and thank them individually, the column wouldn’t fit it its allotted space. If I cut people out, I’m bound to offend.

So, I’ll just simply say this: Thank you. Yes … I mean you.

(Alright — that should take care of everyone.)

Now for the mandatory element. The earliest editions of The Sun (including the first issue, published on September 16, 1880), had the following heading underneath the mast on the front page: “PUBLISHED DAILY (SATURDAYS EXCEPTED) DURING TERM TIME.”

While this might seem like a relatively insignificant little morsel of history for me to reference, at the time that I wrote my first column, the historical stuff really was at the forefront of The Sun’s 123rd Editorial Board’s collective mind — the column was in The Sun’s 125th Anniversary issue, printed on September 16, 2005. Given that a substantial percentage of my time as managing editor was consumed with coordinating the creation of the monumental (if I do say so myself) anniversary issue, I felt that homage to the first issue of The Sun in my moniker was more than appropriate.

Additionally, given that The Sun publishes daily and the staff usually works from the night before into the wee hours of the morning of the day of each issue’s publication, there was only one day each week during the school year that I was managing editor that I wasn’t actually doing any substantial Sun-related work: Saturday.

Voila: Saturdays Excepted.

Sometimes when you get set in one particular lifestyle in a particular place, you lose sight of the rest of your surroundings — maybe the only way to appreciate a place like Cornell (and Ithaca) is to be able to see it from a couple of different angles.

In August 2002, I never in a million years thought that I was starting a seven-year journey, as opposed the more typical four-year one. And, even as my undergrad days began to wind down, I really didn’t expect to stick around for three more years.

But, boy am I glad I did. Being able to see this place from the undergrad and graduate student perspectives is an experience that very few of us get to have, and it’s one that I’ll always cherish.

In the end, the most interesting viewpoint was and has always been as an editor of the publication you’re reading right now. Whether it was staking out a stairwell in Day Hall while a group of students occupied the president’s office or covering Ithaca’s Chili Cook-Off four years in a row, times at The Sun will always be some the fondest memories of my Cornell career.

Kurt Vonnegut ’44 said it best, so I won’t bother to try to continue my own:

“I was happiest when I was all alone — and it was very late at night, and I was walking up the hill after having helped put The Sun to bed. All the other University people, teachers and students alike, were asleep. They had been playing games all day long with what was known about real life. They had been repeating famous arguments and experiments, and asking one another the sorts of hard questions real life would be asking by and by. We on The Sun were already in the midst of real life. By God, if we weren’t! We had just designed and written and caused to be manufactured yet another morning newspaper for a highly intelligent American community of respectable size — yes, and not during the Harding administration, either, but during 1940, 1941 and 1942, with the Great Depression ending, and with World War well begun. I am an atheist, as some of you have gleaned from my writings. But I have to tell you that, as I trudged up the hill so late at night and all alone, I knew that God Almighty approved of me.”

Thanks for seven great years.

Over and out.