Nothing You Say or Write in College Should Haunt You Forever

The goal is not to ruin your career before it starts

That right there, that news clip above, is the first published piece I ever wrote. It’s from the September 17, 1993 issue of the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois. I had been on campus for roughly two weeks when it was published; I was one of those kids who showed up at the student paper before he even showed up for his first class. Roger Ebert, the most famous Daily Illini alum this side of Hugh Hefner (apologies to Dave Eggers and Dan Savage), once wrote that the Daily Illini taught him that his three favorite words in the English language were “by Roger Ebert.” That newspaper made me fall in love with the byline. I wrote constantly. It was my whole college life. It has been my whole life since then.

And I wrote a lot of bad stuff. Nothing terrible, nothing too offensive, I don’t think, nothing that would ruin my life if it came out today, at least as far as I know. But I’ve been out of college for 25 years now, and I like to think I’ve gotten a lot better as a writer, and really as a person. And I’m pretty fortunate that most of the things I wrote in college, before I’d figured out the correct way to communicate, before I’d discovered my voice, are from the pre-internet era. You can’t find them…