Here we are again, at the start of another school year. I don’t know about you, but after doing the whole “back to school” routine for what will now be the 18th time in total in my life, and the fifth time at Georgia State, everything feels familiar, for better or for worse.

As we prepare for another year at The Signal, I wonder if we don’t fall into the same trap of everything feeling too familiar with what we do. There are always great bursts of ideas from the staff at the beginning of the year – ideas that should, in theory at least, improve the production of this paper.

Sometimes, these ideas work. Often, though, either the ideas don’t work out quite as we intended, or we grow complacent and forget to make this the best damn college newspaper imaginable.

This is where you come in.

We want to make our paper accessible to all Georgia State students as much as humanly possible. This would be the point where I ask you to remember that your student newspaper is run by your fellow students from top to bottom – there are limits on what we can do, just as there would be on any college student.

Add to that the fact that we overhauled our staff once again. I fully expect that if you look at this special edition of the paper in print, and compare it to where we are in a month when all of our new staff members are more familiar with our software and our protocols newly reinstituted from the earlier part of the decade, you’ll notice an uptick in the quality of our production.

But we want your feedback on any changes we make, or if you notice that we’re noticeably slipping. We want to hear from you what you want to see in regards to stories.

More than that, though, we also want you to join our staff, especially if you have ideas on content. It’s one thing to comment that we should increase coverage of graduate students on campus, as an example, when we have no graduate students on staff. It’s quite another to have the cojones to join our staff and be willing to write about what’s going on with graduate programs on campus. We want talented writers who care enough about subjects both off and on campus to write about them for us.

On the page adjacent to this, or in the polls section of our website (this would be the part where writing for multiple avenues becomes fun), you’ll notice a poll we conducted with our last special issue from this summer, where we asked students to let us know what they wanted to see the most in The Signal this year. While the topics of the poll will change weekly, we’re going to be asking once a month various questions relating to how we’re doing, and publishing the results in the paper. We’re looking to you to provide us with the answer.

If you read an article that features something you strongly agree or disagree with, you can always email someone on the editorial staff – our email addresses litter the pages of this newspaper. Better yet, you can leave a comment on the article on our website, and potentially start a conversation on a given topic.

After all, this newspaper, which is entering its 77th year of existence, is a representation of our student body – meaning you, dear reader. What good is it to any of us if we aren’t relevant to our student body?